Research Activities

An academic medical center such as Northwestern's strives to quickly apply laboratory research successes to clinical practice. This requires close collaboration among educators and physicians, basic scientists and clinical researchers, as well as  researchers from all the diverse disciplines throughout the Feinberg School, the University, and the McGaw Medical Center hospitals. To this end, in addition to Feinberg's extensive basic science research initiatives, in 2006 significant extra-mural funding helped us establish a clinical and translational sciences research institute.

Scientific investigation at the Feinberg School continues to make progress in our major areas of research emphasis:  bioengineering, cancer, cardiovascular diease and treatment, epidemiology and outcomes, genetic mechanisms of disease, immunology and transplantation, infectious disease, and neuroscience. Additionally, a gene banking project was started in 2002.  The medical school's project funding through research grants and contracts in 2005-06 totaled $251 million. Another $127 million was awarded to faculty members conducting research sponsored by McGaw Medical Center hospitals. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) ranked 6 Feinberg departments in the top 20 nationwide for total grant awards in 2005: urology (3rd), physical medicine and rehabilitation (4th), cell and molecular biology (7th), physiology (10th), preventive medicine (17th) and neurology (20th). 

The medical school's outstanding record of research and patient care includes historical achievements such as the first antiseptic surgery, the first amniocentesis, the first use of a microscope in surgery, and the earliest laser surgeries. Northwestern researchers were the first to address the need for voice rehabilitation and the first to build electric-powered prosthetic limbs for children. Northwestern clinicians achieved a 90 percent cure rate for the once fatal disease choriocarcinoma (cancer of the placenta). In addition, a vaccine for whooping cough was produced at the medical school.

 Federal funds support a number of research centers, institutes and programs  at Northwestern, including ones devoted to atherosclerosis, cancer, arthritis, allergy, diabetes in pregnancy, perinatal medicine, aging, rehabilitation engineering, and spinal cord injury.

Construction of the 12-story, $200 million Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center was completed in April 2005. The center provides approximately 216,810 gross square feet of research space in the fields of cancer, genetics and molecular medicine, neuroscience, bioengineering, advanced medicine, among others. This new research center complements the 16-story Tarry Research and Education Building opened in 1990 as well as the 34,000 square feet of new research space opened in May 2004 in the McGaw Pavilion of the Health Sciences Building.