Member Profile

University of Iowa College of Medicine

Background

The University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine traces its roots to the private College of Physicians and Surgeons that opened in Keokuk, Iowa, in 1850. In 1870, state legislation established a Medical Department fully integrated into the university's Iowa City campus. The University of Iowa was the first in the country to admit men and women on an equal basis, and the first medical class had 10 women among its 37 students. The UI Medical Department was a founding member of the Association of American Medical Colleges in 1876.

For nearly 30 years the Medical Department maintained an agreement to use Iowa City's Mercy Hospital as its clinical teaching facility. A state appropriation allowed the UI to build and open its own teaching hospital in 1898.

The renamed the College of Medicine nearly closed in the wake of reformer Abraham Flexner's critical 1909 review. Flexner cited the low number of patients available for teaching and the faculty's non-resident, part time status as impediments to medical education. To address the problem of inadequate clinical volume, UI leaders successfully lobbied the state to underwrite medical care for Iowa's indigent children and adults at University Hospital. The college gradually replaced part time faculty with full timers, completing the process with establishment of its first faculty practice plan in 1947.

Flexner was sufficiently impressed with Iowa's commitment to medical education that in 1924 he pushed the Rockefeller Foundation to award its first grant to a public university. Iowa used the money to build a new teaching hospital and medical laboratories building.

The college's research enterprise grew steadily and continues today, as the recent dedication of a new building housing both medical education and research facilities coincided with the groundbreaking for additional research facilities scheduled for completion in 2005. Meanwhile, enactment of Medicare and Medicaid helped transform UI Hospitals and Clinics from a predominantly indigent care institution dependent on state support to one serving a diversity of paying patients from throughout the state and Midwest.

Medical education at Iowa has embraced a forward-looking curriculum that integrates clinical skills early on in a structure based on student learning communities. Small group instruction and individual attention help students become lifelong learners in an environment that emphasizes empathetic patient care and the highest professional and scientific standards.

Today the college Flexner nearly closed a century ago sits at the heart of a health sciences center that also includes colleges of dentistry, nursing, pharmacy and public health, as well as UI Hospitals and Clinics and the nearby Iowa City Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Several clinical departments consistently rank among the nation's best, and the college's investigators win enough federal grants to place it in the top 10 public medical schools in NIH funding.

In 2001, the college was named for Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver in recognition of $63 million in support for patient care and research.

Outreach and Service

• UI Health Care faculty and staff provide clinical services at 280 outreach clinics in 64 Iowa communities, including Child Health Specialty Clinics in 14 Iowa communities.
• Outreach clinics provide specialized services including care for children with special needs, high-risk infant follow-up, genetic counseling, prenatal health care, and more.
• More than 1,600 Iowa physicians attend a Continuing Medical Education course presented by the College each year.
• UI Hardin Library for the Health Sciences offers 370,000 print volumes and access to more than 14,000 periodical titles, as well as a variety of clinical e-resources including MD Consult, STAT!Ref, AccessMedicine, the Cochrane Library, InfoRetriever/InfoPOEMS, and more. Hardin Library also produces Hardin MD, an internationally renowned meta-directory of Internet health sources.
• Mini-Medical School offers popular courses on health topics for communities across Iowa.

Teaching

• The UI health sciences campus includes the colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Public Health, and University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, one of the nation's largest university-owned teaching hospitals.
• The Veterans Affairs Iowa City Health Care System provides research support for faculty and educational opportunities for students.
• Highly ranked programs and areas of study among public universities, according to U.S. News & World Report magazine, include physician assistant (#1), speech pathology and audiology (#1), rural medicine (#4), internal medicine (#10), family medicine (#13), research (#13) and primary care (#14).
• Home to the Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of fewer than 40 such centers in the country and the only one in Iowa.

Discovery

• Over the past decade, the College has brought in nearly $1.1 billion in research funding from the National Institutes of Health.
• College faculty garnered 325 NIH research grants worth a total of $133.6 million in fiscal 2007.
• Four UI Carver College of Medicine faculty members are Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators.
• Sixteen UI faculty are members of the Institute of Medicine.
• Three UI Carver College of Medicine faculty are members of the National Academy of Sciences.

Major Research Units

Recently the College won a federal Clinical and Translational Science Award worth $33.8 million over five years, and broke ground for the Iowa Institute for Biomedical Discovery. Other major research areas include: aging, Alzheimer's disease, autism, brain and language function, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and endocrinology, digestive diseases, geriatrics, gene therapy, Huntington's disease, macular degeneration and blinding diseases, nephrology, neurological diseases, and viral pathogenesis. The College also has Specialized Centers of Research in pulmonary disease, schizophrenia, hypertension, osteoarthritis, pediatric cardiovascular disease, communication disorders, rural airway disease, cochlear implants, cystic fibrosis and acute lung injury, and a Specialized Program of Research Excellence in lymphoma.

Current Projects

Project 3000

Cubs first baseman Derrek Lee announced his partnership with Boston Celtics CEO and co-owner Wyc Grousbeck and the Carver Nonprofit Genetic Testing Laboratory at the University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine to combat Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), an important cause of genetic blindness in children.

Lee and Grousbeck call their effort Project 3000 because they plan to raise money to provide state-of-the-art genetic testing for every man, woman and child in the United States with LCA - about 3000 individuals in all.

The John and Marcia Carver Nonprofit Genetic Testing Laboratory in the Carver Family Center for Macular Degeneration at the UI will be the lead research site in this genetic testing effort. The interdisciplinary Carver Family CMD is a major international center for research and treatment of degenerative diseases of the eye. Other partners in the Project 3000 effort include the Foundation Fighting Blindness of Owings Mills, Md. and the Foundation for Retinal Research of Chicago, IL.

Ponseti International

Ponseti International (www.ponseti.info) is a University of Iowa-based effort to promote worldwide the Posenti method, a non-surgical, low-cost clubfoot treatment technique developed at the UI. The method has a 95 percent correction rate -- better than surgery -- and can be taught to non-physician health care providers, making it an effective treatment in areas of countries with few or no doctors. Nearly 80 percent of children born with clubfoot live in impoverished nations.

The effort is led by Jose Morcuende, an internationally recognized expert on clubfoot who is a UI professor of orthopaedic surgery. More than 50 years ago, early in his UI career, Ignacio Ponseti, M.D., realized that surgical approaches were not successful. Ponseti, now emeritus professor of orthopaedics and rehabilitation at the UI, set about developing the method that now bears his name.

A fall 2007 international conference hosted by the UI on the method drew more than 200 health care providers from 44 countries. The members issued a declaration to make the Ponseti method accessible worldwide. Representatives from the National Institutes of Health, which is helped fund the symposium, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were among those supporting the initiative.