INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana’s only medical school has won a $60 million grant to recruit top physicians and scientists as part of its push to spur research into cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other diseases.
Indiana University President Michael A. McRobbie said the Lilly Endowment Inc. grant will allow the IU School of Medicine to target some of the “most vexing, problematic” illnesses.
The grant, announced Tuesday, is IU’s third-largest single gift.
McRobbie said the funding will be used to create the new Indiana Physician Scientist Initiative, an effort he said IU hopes can move the school into the top echelon of life science and information technology research schools.
About $38 million will go toward luring 20 top physician scientists in the fields of cancer, neuroscience and diabetes and vascular disease. IU plans to match these dollars with its own resources.
Some $10 million will support IU’s medical scientist training program.
School Dean D. Craig Brater said the initiative seeks to “recruit a cluster of intellectual talent” devoted to turning scientific discoveries into new medical products and treatments for illnesses that will also create new jobs and businesses.
Brater said $6 million of the grant will go toward a big expansion of the school’s Indiana Biobank, which stores in liquid nitrogen biological samples from patients with various diseases. That repository allows researchers to study DNA tissues that can shed light on the genetic factors behind those ills.
Some $2 million will go to specialists who manage Biobank data. The remaining $4 million will expand the school’s international programs in Kenya, Mexico, Honduras and China and fund a program that helps move basic research from the laboratory to human testing.
McRobbie said the grant from the Lilly Endowment grant boosts to nearly $600 million the amount IU has received from the Indianapolis-based endowment over the past three decades.
The endowment was founded in 1937 by three members of the Lilly family through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Co.
McRobbie said the $60 million grant will be a boon to IU’s medical researchers.
“It will provide them with the advanced technologies, training and resources they need to bring their research discoveries to the bedside. These physician-scientists will use their clinical and research expertise to address some of the most vexing, problematic questions about human health,” he said.
