Places at the forefront of research in their fields

March 30, 2005 11:36 AM

I need the names of some institutions (schools, hospitals, colleges, whatever) that are at the forefront of medical research in their fields.

The kinds of places that, were a gigantic medical breakthrough to be made in the next five years or so, would be the places to make it. Spinal cord injuries, cancer research, stem cell stuff, basically anything you can think of. Thanks!

posted by jennyjenny to Health & Fitness (12 answers total)

Going by uninformed reputation, Johns Hopkins comes to mind, foremost. Also, a couple of the UCs. USNews is not my definitive guide, but worth a look.
posted by Gyan at 11:43 AM on March 30, 2005

This question is so broad as to be almost unanswerable. Its like asking where the next great American novel is going to come from. There are thousands of researchers in these fields across the country in acadmia, government, and private industry. And, increasingly, medical "breakthroughs" don't come out of one institution, but are the result of collaborations between dozens of researchers at different universities. So I'd advise you to narrow your question down (or give us some information on why you're asking it) if you want to get any useful answers.

That said, an extremely blunt metric is the amount of NIH funding that institutions receive. This source lists the following as the top ten recipients in 2002:

Johns Hopkins U.
U. of Pennsylvania
U. of Washington
U. of California at San Francisco
Washington U. in St. Louis
U. of Michigan
U. of California at Los Angeles
U. of Pittsburgh
Yale U.
Duke U.

This year's list this probably looks pretty much the same.
posted by googly at 11:54 AM on March 30, 2005

Washington University in St. Louis's med school is one of the best in the country -- among the research they've been involved with recently was the sequencing of the X chromosome. I seem to recall that there were some huge breakthroughs at Wash U in the late '80s/early '90s (while I was an undergrad there) in identifying isolated instances of AIDS and AIDS-related viruses in tissue samples from the '60s and '70s, which helped to determine the course of the disease before the big outbreak of the early '80s.
posted by scody at 11:54 AM on March 30, 2005

I work Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a rather large filthy-rich non-profit that funds medical research at college campuses and other research insitutions across the country. You pretty much have to be doing research at the forefront of your chosen field to make the cut. Here's a publicly available list of the current scientists (investigators), sorted by institution. Looking at the varying concentrations of HHMI-funded researchers at any site may provide a clue as to where giant medical breakthroughs could take place.
posted by pmbuko at 11:55 AM on March 30, 2005

I work for...
posted by pmbuko at 11:55 AM on March 30, 2005

Response by poster: I know it's an unbelievably broad question, googly, but basically what I'm looking for is the educated guesses of informed people like yourselves.

This is for a creative piece of work that will speculate on this issue, not for any major life decisions or anything like that, so it's safe to speculate. Thanks!
posted by jennyjenny at 12:02 PM on March 30, 2005

THE BELL CURVE
What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?

Amazing article from a bit back about the bell curve in medicine using cystic fibrosis as the case study. Cystic fibrosis is one of the few diseases where we do know who is the best in the field. In this article: those who are the best in the feild do sigificantly better work than those who are average; doctors are resisting any grading, they don't want us to know where to get the best treatment, they want us to think that all doctors are relatively the same when, well, they are very much not.
posted by scazza at 12:10 PM on March 30, 2005

One approach would be to focus speculation on a specific area, like the top genomics research centers. Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is the one I know best. They were one of the five centers involved in the human genome project.
posted by acridrabbit at 12:31 PM on March 30, 2005

OK, Jenny. One more point: if you're looking for where future medical discoveries will come from, then it will likely be one or several of the academic research centers that are listed in my previous post (I'd also add some other top universities with good medical centers, such as Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Univ. of Pittsburgh and Cornell). This is where most of the basic biomedical research occurs, and where breakthroughs in our understanding of things like stem cells, cancer pathology, and spinal-cord injuries occurs.

However, academic research centers seldom make actual products. These are left up to the private sector to finance, develop, and produce. So, for example, a UCSF researcher may make a breakthrough in some aspect of cancer research, but s/he wouldn't develop a new drug as a result - a big pharmaceutical company like Pfizer or Glaxo would do so.

There are also a lot of smaller biotech companies - often started by researchers from the top academic centers - that are developing new drugs and therapies in these areas. A lot of venture capitalists think that this is where some of the most innovative work is being done, since they can take more risks than big pharmaceutical companies can, and they are pouring money into the sector. But, so far at least, they haven't yet lived up to their promise.

If I were to speculate, I would say that the most likely scenario is that a heavily government-funded researcher at a top academic institution will make an important discovery, persuade a bunch of his/her colleagues to start a small company, and turn that discovery into a useable therapy/product.

But thats only a guess.
posted by googly at 12:36 PM on March 30, 2005

The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the other Harvard Medical School associated institutions are usually safe bets for this kind of thing.
posted by feloniousmonk at 12:47 PM on March 30, 2005

Institute of Child Health, the research centre attached to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London.

My two pennies. I used to work there (not in a research capacity).
posted by altolinguistic at 12:10 AM on March 31, 2005

Also, NIH (Bethesda), CDC (Atlanta), but it really depends what area of discovery you're looking for. General cutting edge research goes on EVERYWHERE, because thousands of people need to work on the same thing. Stanford, the Ivys, the UCs, John's Hop. all immediately come to mind. Ask a more selective question, and you'll get much better answers.
posted by ruwan at 1:32 AM on March 31, 2005