Another cornerstone was the Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology established by Harvard Medical School in 1998 to pursue chemical genetics as an academic discipline.

[11] The Broad Institute is made up of three types of organizational units: core member laboratories, research programs, and platforms.

[15] The faculty and staff of the Broad Institute include physicians, geneticists, and molecular, chemical, and computational biologists.

It was designed by Architects Elkus Manfredi with Lab Planner McLellan Copenhagen and was awarded high honors by R&D Magazine.

[31][32][33] On October 10, 2017, it was reported that Deerfield Management Co. was giving $50 million to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to support biology research.

The 2014 report from Thomson Reuters' ScienceWatch entitled "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds" recognized that 12 out of the 17 "hottest" researchers in science belonged to genomics, and 4 out of the top 5 were affiliated with the Broad Institute.

[37] Eric S. Lander, Stuart L. Schreiber, Aviv Regev and Edward M. Scolnick are members of the National Academy of Sciences[38] and the Institute of Medicine.

[39] Feng Zhang received the 2014 Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation, its highest honor that annually recognizes an outstanding researcher under the age of 35, for contributions to both optogenetics and CRISPR technology.

[40] In biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology areas, the institute was ranked #1 in the "Mapping Excellence" report, a survey that assessed high-impact publications.