Johns Hopkins University entered the turn of the millennium still ranked at the top of the list in earning research dollars. The School of Medicine retained its place as the principal recipient of federal research funds in the United States and ranked second among the nation’s select medical schools in training grants. Research expenditures in the University and the Applied Physics Laboratory exceeded $1 billion.

The University’s sponsors include federal, state and local agencies, private foundations, and generous benefactors who are among those with the imagination to expect tangible results in areas only dreamed about not so long ago. Individual investigator projects over $1million are fairly common, especially as the NIH doubles its research budget and other science agencies gear up for increased spending on research grants, but the pressures on investigators to quickly produce these results also multiply. To help mediate these pressures and position itself for continued research leadership in the 21st century, the School of Medicine formed the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences (IBBS). Concentrating the eight basic science departments under a single umbrella will foster the interdisciplinary connections that more sponsors recognize as the key to success. Catalyzed by $30 million from a private donor, a $125 million funding campaign is under way to confirm this effort as a model for biomedical research and teaching in the basic sciences.

Johns Hopkins faculty’s virtuosity would be hampered without the best research facilities. Buildings designed for modern biomedical research must break the molds of the past and offer the capacity to transcend the boundaries between scientific disciplines. A 10-story, $140 million research building begun on the East Baltimore campus this year is such a space. When the Broadway Research Building opens in 2004, clusters of laboratories arranged according to scientific problems will have replaced the traditional departmental structure. This design, part of a $324 million investment in research infrastructure on the medical campus, will promote natural interaction among researchers from diverse disciplines who can help each other with their focused insights. Anchored by the McKusick-Nathans Institute for Genetic Medicine, the building will also contain core facilities, offering advanced technologies and techniques out of the range of individual labs, and a state-of-the-art mouse facility for modeling human disease.

The most advanced and powerful equipment is another necessity for the progression of knowledge. On the Homewood campus the Center for Macromolecular X-Ray Crystallography opened with receipt of a 1,600-pound Rigaku X-ray generator. Funded in part by a $300,000 National Science Foundation grant, the new center will serve Hopkins scientists from Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine who study proteins and nucleic acids to gain insights into their structures that otherwise would be unobtainable.

In biomedical research, cancer is being tackled from every known angle. Breast cancer has received particular attention from both private and government sponsors. Avon Products Foundation made an award of $2.2 million from funds raised by the Avon Breast Cancer Crusade to the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center. Studies will run the gamut from molecular genetic biomarkers for cancer detection to behavioral aspects associated with screening and care. Breast cancer research gave the Oncology Center an unprecedented fourth SPORE (Specialized Programs for Research Excellence) grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This SPORE joins others currently funding research in cancers of the colon, prostate, and lungs. It will provide $2.7 million during the first year of funding and a total of $14 million over five years for a range of prevention, diagnostic, and therapeutic strategies. NCI also awarded researchers in the Bloomberg School of Public Health $4.4 million for studies designed to demonstrate the ability to evaluate rapidly and efficiently multiple types of biomarkers for the early detection of cancer or markers of developing cancer. Using study cohorts, which have been active since 1974, researchers will learn how to assess potential markers for breast, skin, and lung cancers rapidly and aid in their transition from the laboratory to the clinical setting.

Alternative research and treatments for cancer are gaining prominence in the medical arena. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine awarded a five-year $7.8 million grant to Johns Hopkins Medicine to establish the Johns Hopkins Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Cancer. Initially, four studies of alternative therapies for breast and prostate cancers will be pursued, including the use of certain herbs as antioxidants, soy and sour cherries for pain relief, and the impact of prayer on the health of African-American women with breast cancer. The findings are believed to be generalizable to other forms of cancer. The center eventually will review and fund pilot studies of other alternative treatments with the goals of determining the most promising alternative treatments and the most scientific way of studying them.

Many other diseases are undergoing close scrutiny, which is changing thinking about effective therapies. Approaches range from investigation of their genetic antecedents to the sociological factors that may trigger disease or determine whether or how those afflicted are treated. Researchers in Medicine, Cardiology, and Biomedical Engineering, for example, are working to correct heart failure abnormalities by dual gene therapy. The NIH has provided them with $1.6 million to test the hypothesis that targeting a single gene is ineffective because of the interplay of factors in heart physiology. Hopkins is helping to advance understanding of the possibilities for using human cells as therapeutic agents. With a $58.5 million gift from a visionary anonymous donor, the School of Medicine has initiated the Institute for Cell Engineering. Researchers comprising multidisciplinary teams have an exceptional new environment in which to work on cell engineering problems, such as the use of adult stem cells, unraveling mysteries and applying the results to the repair of everything from heart failure to injuries to neurological disorders.

Child health is of great concern for the future of our nation and the world. Johns Hopkins Children’s Center gastroenterologists received a $1 million research grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study viral hepatitis in the children of injection drug users.

Eradication in the U.S. of hepatitis B and C infection, to which these children are prone, could save at least $200 million over the next 10 years. Pediatrics researchers received $1.9 million from the National Institute for Nursing Research to determine the benefits of home nebulizer education intervention for low-income minority children with asthma. These children have unusually high rates of emergency department care and hospital visits compared to other children. The researchers hope that the intervention will reduce morbidity and save money that can be rechanneled into finding a cure.

Led by the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins has intensified its commitment to global child health with a grant of $20 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to find the precise combination of vitamins and other micronutrients that will most effectively save lives and prevent illness among impoverished mothers and children in the developing world. Nepal, representing this world, became a double beneficiary of micronutrient research when the National Institute for Child Health and Development awarded Bloomberg School investigators $3 million to study the impact of zinc supplementation on child mortality there. This follows Hopkins’ critical research on vitamin A supplementation, which has already drastically reduced preschool child and maternal mortality. The drive to eradicate infectious diseases and epidemics prompted a fourth major grant to Public Health from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Hopkins and the University of Maryland School of Medicine each received grants of $21.4 million to work collaboratively to develop a safe and effective new vaccine to protect the world’s youngest children from measles and help save millions of lives. Bloomberg School researchers also hopeto conquer malaria within the next 10 years. A $100 million gift from an anonymous donor has established the Johns Hopkins Malaria Institute to battle an affliction so great that it literally can leave a whole country in ruins.

AIDS is still a major global tragedy. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases inaugurated the next generation of AIDS research under Hopkins leadership. The agency committed $7.3 million to help fund a collaborative AIDS research effort by a group representing 101 researchers at the schools of Medicine, Public Health, and Arts and Sciences. The Johns Hopkins Center for AIDS Research will focus on four critical aspects of HIV infection: pathogenesis, latent HIV infection, immune restoration, and prevention; and encourage high-risk innovative research. The threat of local and global devastation from naturally occurring new and emerging infections as well as man-made biological warfare is behind the concept of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at the schools of Public Health and Medicine. A $300,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation stimulated the center’s work in analyzing the public health dimensions of these threats and helping to develop tools that would build a response system to these problems at the municipal, county, state, and federal levels. The Sloan Foundation has focused its support on the biological weapons aspect with a $3.5 million award to examine the national security and public health emergency potential of such a crisis. In the biotechnology sector, the U.S. Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command, known as SBCCOM, and the Applied Physics Laboratory are working together to create and operate a national biotechnology center of excellence to counteract the possibility of mass destruction. Including the participation of the academic research divisions of the University, the center will ultimately team Army agencies, universities, and private companies in projects to research, develop, test, and deliver innovative biotechnologies, and provide related education and training to Army leaders.

Environmental stresses as contributing factors to the state of human health have attracted serious funding this year. A team of chemists in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and environmental engineers in the Whiting School of Engineering received a five-year $2.71 million grant from the National Science Foundation for basic research in environmental science, focusing on a widely used class of industrial chemicals—organohalides—that have applications in such everyday processes as dry cleaning and air conditioning. In collaboration with partners in industry and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratories, the Hopkins team is studying ways to break down the chemicals into less toxic substances. Awarded under NSF’s Collaborative Research Activities in Environmental Molecular Science program, known as CRAEMS, the grant is among the largest made under this program. Exploring the interaction of living things with the environment is a priority of the NSF Biocomplexity Program, which seeks to integrate the biological, physical, and social sciences to understand fundamental processes. Researchers in the Whiting School received $1 million under this program to study eukaryotic chemotaxis, a biological process that occurs to some extent in almost every cell type at some time during its development. This ability to sense the direction of external chemical sources and respond by either moving toward or away from them is a major component of the inflammatory and wound-healing responses, the mammalian reproductive systems, the development of the nervous system, and tumor metastasis. A thorough understanding of this phenomenon will advance scientific knowledge of one of the basic properties of life—purposeful movement—and enable a logical approach to the treatment of many devastating human diseases that result when this process fails.

Even Hopkins space research has implications for human health. A Johns Hopkins–Goddard Space Flight Center team received an $815,500 three-year grant from NASA to develop a prototype of a device to monitor the health of the atmosphere. The satellite-mounted fiber-optic laser system could be in orbit gathering data on air pollution and other atmospheric changes within five to seven years. As manned space flights become longer and more frequent, space medicine, where the convergence between technology and the human body reaches peak expression, is filling a critical need. The NASA-sponsored National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) approved more than $7 million over three years to fund five biomedical projects, including a “digital human,” proposed by the Applied Physics Laboratory. APL, along with the School of Medicine, is a charter member of NSBRI, a consortium of 12 institutions headed by the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. NASA also recognized the Applied Physics Lab’s skill in conducting space missions with approval to move into the development phase of the first trip to the planet Mercury in more than a generation. APL will manage the mission and design, build, and operate the MESSENGER spacecraft. The $256 million MESSENGER (for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) is the third Discovery project managed by APL.

Hopkins is also keeping pace with space age technologies. The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center succeeded in its second competition for a five-year $5.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Specializing in nanostructured materials—materials of extraordinarily small dimensions that have applications in computers and other magnetoelectronic devices—the center supports research by eight scientists from Arts and Sciences and Engineering, two from Brown University, and one from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and hosts educational outreach programs.

Strategic partnerships have created some important new research resources that reflect salient contemporary issues. These alliances maintain the University’s fundamental mission of research and education while helping to apply the knowledge gained to matters of crucial importance. Anticipating the continuing debate on health care, the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Georgetown University Law Center entered into one such partnership with the establishment of the Center for Law and the Public’s Health, located at the Bloomberg School. A three-year $900,000 award from the Public Health Law Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention readies the center, in partnership with the CDC Public Health Law Program and other organizations, to conduct applied research, training and education, and other activities to strengthen the contribution law makes to improved health. Privacy is no less a concern in an increasingly electronic world. To confront these issues, the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute (JHUISI) was formed, supported by a $10 million seed gift. Involving nearly all University schools and divisions as well as industry and government agencies, where some of the most advanced knowledge in information security is held, the institute will examine major security and privacy issues in their technical, business, legal, and policy contexts.

Research deriving from the complexities of human behavior is helping to draw thinking away from one-size-fits-all models. Supported by $1.6 million from the National Institute of Mental Health, investigators in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine are studying the regulation of energy balance in obese individuals. They are building a unique genetic model of obesity that considers multiple elements: the interaction of genetic determinants with environmental factors such as exercise and dietary practices, as well as with signaling pathways in the brain. Behaviors associated with contrasting life stages are the objectives of funding in the School of Public Health. Researchers there received $3.8 million from CDC to establish the JHU Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence. Departments and investigators throughout the school will work together to formulate programs that can guide the development and implementation of interventions designed to deter violent behavior. At the other end of the spectrum is a $3 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to explain disparities in cognitive function in seniors more completely than can be shown by gene-environment interactions alone. The goal of this research is to understand the direct and indirect influences of lead absorption, four specific genes, individual social and behavioral traits, contextual factors, and blood pressure in accounting for the associations of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status with cognitive function and cognitive decline. True to its mission of understanding the nature and dynamics of ecosystems, engineered systems, and societies, the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering in the Whiting School received $1.4 million from the Environmental Protection Agency to consider the implications of climate change for regional air pollution, health effects, and energy consumption behavior. Findings based on the interconnections among these components will lead to better models for environmental management and achieve improved living standards.