Now-this exact instant-is a remarkable moment in the history of medicine. If you talk to any adult anywhere, any person in their 20s or older, about some of the real treatments available to patients today, then much of what you're describing-gene therapy for blindness, making tumors glow for more precise removal, and re-engineering patients' own immune cells to cure cancer-is something that was the stuff of science fiction when they were born.
Penn Medicine-this particular institution rooted in Philadelphia as home to both the nation's first medical school and first hospital, now united as the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn's Perelman School of Medicine-is an equally remarkable place, as the modern birthplace of so many of these spectacular biomedical firsts. Penn Medicine research has substantially contributed to 45 new U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals for new disease treatments (and counting) since 2013. Among these were the first mRNA vaccines, which quelled a global pandemic, saved millions of lives, and earned the Nobel Prize.
Why here, and what ingredients did it take to make this avalanche of recent breakthroughs? Part of the answer is seen as an almost inevitable part of the ethos of Penn Medicine today-that the institution is united in purpose across all of the functions of academic medicine. Excellence in medical education and training uplifts excellence in research, and research drives innovation in the best care for patients, all in an ongoing virtuous cycle.
Another part of the answer, though, is that this unity in excellence at Penn Medicine owes a great deal to what came just a couple of decades before.
"Penn Medicine has emerged as a preeminent academic medical system over the past several decades largely because of the foundations laid by two of our former deans, Bill Kelley and Arthur Rubenstein," said Jonathan A. Epstein, MD, dean of the Perelman School of Medicine and executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania for the Health System. "Their vision set the stage for breakthrough therapies that have transformed the world, and created an expectation of excellence that continuously draws the brightest medical students and research trainees to learn at Penn and go back out to make an impact everywhere."
