NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Hugh Kaul Foundation has donated $7 million to the University of Alabama at Birmingham to establish the Hugh Kaul Personalized Medicine Institute, the university said on Tuesday.
The institute will house an interdisciplinary program with a focus on new discoveries in fields that include cardiovascular disease, transplantation, cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases, immunology, and neuroscience. Along with two other new UAB facilities, the UAB Informatics Institute and the UAB HudsonAlpha Center for Genomic Medicine, the Hugh Kaul Personalized Medicine Institute will accelerate personalized medicine in Alabama and beyond, UAB said.
All three facilities will be housed in the UAB School of Medicine.
The $7 million gift will be used to retain new faculty, recruit new physicians and scientists, and build an administrative infrastructure to attract federal and private research funding, the university said. The Hugh Kaul Foundation previously gifted about $9 million to UAB, including the lead gift for the Hugh Kaul Human Genetics Building.
"The institute will enhance the management of patients in large populations, creating a research framework based on genomic information that will allow us to ask questions regarding racial and ethnic disparities, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, neurosciences, and other areas, and expand our translational capacity for genomic discovery," the institute's Interim Director Nita Limdi said in a statement. "This program will continually differentiate us from our local and regional peers and make us a national player in the development of new treatment therapies based on our understanding of the human genome."