“The vision for us is that through research, through education, through our clinical care, we want to radically improve health for the region and for the world,” Anantha Shekhar, Pitt’s senior vice chancellor for the health sciences and John and Gertrude Petersen Dean, School of Medicine, told School of Medicine faculty members in his Sept. 24 State of the School address.
Speaking to the school’s many high-impact research grants, he noted a $100 million Department of Defense grant for trauma and emergency services that had been announced earlier that day and a recent award of $13 million for equity in maternal and reproductive health.
In another measure of the school’s reputational excellence, applications for next fall’s entering MD class surged by 36%, with more than 11,300 to date. And the incoming cohort of PhD students in the graduate program is the largest ever, reflecting the importance of research in the School of Medicine’s mission.
“We're one of the few medical schools that is usually in the top 10 in both the research category as well as the primary care category,” he said. “Typically, research-intensive medical schools are not all that great in primary care or vice versa. We have always had a great balance.”
But Shekhar said he would like to be in the top five, and explained what the school is doing to get there.
His presentation showed progress on each of the eight key goals he has established for Pitt Health Sciences, six highly respected schools, including the School of Medicine, School of Dental Medicine, School of Nursing, School of Pharmacy, School of Public Health and School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.
The stretch goals he discussed include expanding interprofessional education, improving community health and exploring opportunities for commercialization.
One priority is having a faculty that represents a diversity of backgrounds and socioeconomic experiences and tremendous strides have been made in this area, he said. Due to work done over the past four years, the faculty reflects broad representation, which has enriched the student experience.
The promotion and tenure process has improved, with a significant reduction in processing time. And efforts are ongoing to meet the child care needs of faculty members.
Beyond academics, community engagement is a priority, he said. The school aims to apply its great research prowess to solutions and products for patients. He noted that Pitt is working on developing three technology platforms to help advance research to address eight areas of disease.
Shekhar said that the School of Medicine is just beginning to focus on commercialization. He introduced a program called Pitt.INC, which will help faculty members, graduate students and postdocs who have what he called “a killer experiment” jump-start the process to the commercialization of ideas while protecting their interests.
“The entry point is creating a simple narrative of what your idea is for commercialization, just like you would write your clinical significance or translational impact.”
If the idea meets the criteria of a credible commercial hypothesis, the person who proposed it will be accepted into what will be called the Academy of Inventors. “That is your membership into this club of commercial innovators,” Shekhar said.
In the last year, Shekhar said, the School of Medicine had roughly $770 million in research expenditures.
“Fantastic, but that is really mostly federal grants, mostly NIH, mostly DOD and other sorts of agencies.” In contrast, corporate and industrial funding from sources such as pharmaceutical companies are areas where the school needs to grow, he said. “When we look at clinical trials, especially industry-sponsored clinical trials, last year, our entire program was roughly $28 million.”
The newly established Clinical Trials Office is designed to address that, he said. The first pilot trials are to be tested in the system from October through December.
Other commercialization efforts include Pitt BioForge, which Shekhar said will offer a program called FuRNAce that “will create any product you need from mRNA-based technology.”
Among the new highlights this year, he spoke of the Bethel Musculoskeletal Research Center, which recently received an additional $18.5 million to establish a biobank; the Pittsburgh Integrated Translational Neuroscience Institute, which will focus on enhancing cognition across the lifespan, precision medicine in the neurosciences and neurotechnologies; the planned Pittsburgh Hearing Institute to be located at UPMC Mercy Pavilion and the Healthy Hill Alliance, which will address neighborhood ecology, community development and health and well-being.