This fall, University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann announced the launch of a $750M investment advancing Penn’s pathbreaking contributions to innovative and impactful areas of medicine, public health, science, and technology over the next five years. The plan includes major new investments for the Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM) in research space, priority research programs, and faculty recruitment and retention–an initiative designed to have a positive impact across all mission areas across the integrated academic medical center.
“Just as we have made investments to build new clinical and education facilities like the Pavilion and the Jordan Medical Education Center that place us in the vanguard, it is critically important that our space for research keeps pace with the continued growth in funding for our faculty’s innovative ideas,” wrote J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD, executive vice president of the University for the health system and dean of PSOM, and Jon Epstein, MD, executive vice dean and chief scientific officer, in a message to the PSOM community.
In addition, the investment will add programmatic and capital support to areas of rapidly evolving medical research and to infrastructure in multiple advanced core technologies. It will further support investment in recruitment and retention of highly promising research faculty, in particular for those who are underrepresented in science and medicine.
These investments were made possible in part by funds generated from the licensing of Penn Medicine inventions in a variety of fields, including mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and CAR-T cell therapy. “It is a tremendous point of pride that the innovation born within our laboratories is being deployed to save lives across the world,” Jameson and Epstein wrote, “and we are committed to reinvesting these resources responsibly to foster additional breakthroughs that will define medicine as the 21st century unfolds.”