Informational Piece: Biomedical Research

The increased longevity of humans over the past century can be a result of advanced developmental treatments in medical research. Biomedical research involves the work done by scientists from many fields to improve the health and well being of humans through the development of new and improved treatments in clinical medicine. This field of research focuses on cancer, preventive medicine, cellular biology, molecular biology, aging, pharmacology, virology, genetics, and neuroscience. In biomedical research, there have been new discoveries of diseases and microbes, and even stem cells found in multicellular organisms that renew themselves and differentiate to specialized cell types. Stem cells can be grown and transformed to specialized cells which can be useful to medical engineering.

Without researches and the development of new vaccines and treatments, more humans would be infected and death rates would be extrememly higher. Recent major discoveries include vaccines for deadly pandemic diseases such as smallpox which was officially eradicated in December 1979. Scientists are continuing to find better treatments for HIV, cancer and other diseases found in developing countries like Asia and Africa. The treatments are evaluted for safety and effectiveness through multiple processes known as clinical trials before they are approved and released in the market. Most of biomedical research is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), federal funding, foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, pharmaceudical companies and other organizations.

Since most of biomedical research funding is from the NIH, the statistic compiled by the NIH was used to determine the top-ranked biomedical schools for graduate students in the United States. Some of the schools include Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Emory University, University of California Los Angeles, Yale University, Duke University, University of Pennsylvania, Washington University and many more throughout the United States. The costs of medical research have increased to levels that even the wealthiest universities can no longer afford. (Baird 2003) Most of the funding for the research in these schools are from NIH and federal, state or local governments therefore some of the students from the elite universities are priviledged enough to be accepted to these top-rated graduate programs.

Cited Information
P. Baird, 2003: Getting it right: industry sponsorship and medical research [Internet] Can. Med. Assoc. J., May 13, 2003; 168(10): 1267 - 1269. [cited 2009 May 20] Available from http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/167/11/1221