The institute also has about 60 associate members, who don’t base their operations at Broad but can make use of its resources for their research.

Currently, Broad is centered at a 100,000-square-foot facility at 320 Charles St., the former home of the Whitehead Genome Center.

Last month, construction began on a permanent home for the institute at 7 Cambridge Center, a site that abuts the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and is near MIT’s biology department. The site will have 220,000 square feet in a seven-story building that will feature 60 percent lab space. MIT will be its landlord.

Lander said having a permanent facility, with more space for research and a location convenient to the Kendall Square T station, will mark a critical step for Broad. For now, only he is based solely at Broad, he says: Schreiber is still based at Harvard and Golub and Altshuler split time between Broad and their home facilities.

He said only half of the new building will be devoted to traditional lab work. The other half, devoted to larger projects, will include more open labs and more shared space, he said.

“It will be a very different-looking building,” Lander said. “It’s not a question of we’re now going to get a state-of-the-art thing we don’t have. We’re now going to push the state-of-the-art much further.”

For funding, Lander said the center, like many scientific research pursuits, will rely heavily on federal funding, and that researchers have been writing a number of grants. It has already received some major government funding, including an approximately $30 million grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute and a $75 million contract with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

But he added that he will continue to court philanthropic support for Broad, because independent funding will allow Broad researchers to try some of their most cutting-edge ideas.

“If you want to do things that are risky, if you want to do things that are at the edge…philanthropic support is absolutely crucial,” he said. “It’s incredibly valuable money. Even though it isn’t the majority of the budget, it is what makes the place really special.”

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.