History and Overview of the Program in Molecular Medicine

The Program in Molecular Medicine was established in 1989 in the Two Biotech building located within the overall Medical School campus, in the Massachusetts Biotechnology Research Park. Its goal was to attract top scientists to meet the challenge of investigating exciting questions in biomedicine within a collaborative spirit. Michael Czech, then the Chair of the Department of Biochemistry, was appointed Founding Director of the new Program, moving his laboratory group in 1990 to Two Biotech.

Molecular Medicine was provided control over space on two floors in Two Biotech and financial resources for its operation and recruiting. However, all faculty appointments were made through one of the Medical School departments in this first phase of development. The strategy for the scientific development of the program was to assemble outstanding investigators with overlapping scientific interests in order to probe molecular mechanisms that underlie physiological processes and diseases associated with them. These laboratory groups brought a broad spectrum of state-of-the-art methodologies to the program. Some of the instrumentation and technical capabilities established in Molecular Medicine included X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance, digital imaging of single live cells, and the production of transgenic and knockout animals.

The Program in Molecular Medicine initially included several laboratory groups already at the Medical School, and these founding faculty moved into Two Biotech in 1989/1990. Over the next few years the Program recruited additional faculty and expanded to fifteen medical school faculty research groups, affiliated with seven basic science and clinical departments. These included biochemistry and molecular biology, cell biology, medicine, molecular genetics and microbiology, pediatrics, pharmacology and physiology. The Two Biotech building was purchased by the Medical School a few years later and the entire building was eventually allocated to the Program in Molecular Medicine.

Over the years the Program continued to recruit faculty, leading to its current number of twenty research laboratories within the building. Further recent faculty recruitments and expansion has now included three Molecular Medicine laboratories (Theurkauf, director of the Cell and Developmental Dynamics Program, Hagstrom and Ceol) in Four Biotech and one (Kim, also director of the Mouse Phenotyping Center) in Five Biotech. These are viewed as temporary locations until a new research building is constructed (groundbreaking projected for this year).

In 2000, the Program in Molecular Medicine was granted departmental status, with the ability to make academic appointments within its own “department”, although it retained its original name—Program in Molecular Medicine. Molecular Medicine as a department currently has 23 laboratory groups (21 of which are headed by tenured or tenure track faculty) in Biotech buildings 2, 4 and 5 and has both financial and space responsibilities for all of these groups. In addition, 14 tenured or tenure track faculty in other programs (that do not have departmental status) have primary appointments in Molecular Medicine and are treated as regular faculty of Molecular Medicine (faculty meetings, retreats, promotions, tenure decisions), except that responsibility for their financial issues and laboratory space is with their Program Directors. These latter 14 faculty are located in the Lazar Research Building in the Program in Gene Function and Expression (PGFE) (13 faculty) or the Program in Bioinformatics (1 faculty).

Michael Green, recruited by Czech to Molecular Medicine from Harvard in 1990, was appointed in 2002 founding Director of the new Program in Gene Function and Expression located in the Lazar Research Building. Dr. Green has recruited numerous faculty since that time and, as described above, 13 of those faculty in his Program have elected to have their primary faculty appointment in Molecular Medicine. Zhiping Weng, was recruited to UMASS MED in 2008 as Director of the Program in Bioinformatics and has begun recruiting faculty to her Program. One of these has elected to join Molecular Medicine as a tenure track faculty member (Jeff Jensen). In addition, Craig Peterson, first recruited to Molecular Medicine as an Assistant Professor in 1991 and now Professor, was appointed as Vice Chair of Molecular Medicine in 2004 and continues to serve in this position.

Thus Molecular Medicine now has 37 faculty with primary appointments located in 4 research buildings. These faculty are active in faculty meetings, personnel action deliberations (including tenure decisions), retreats, seminars and journal clubs, recruitments to the Program and social functions. Molecular Medicine sponsors a monthly “in house” seminar program for its own faculty seminars as well as a distinguished lecturer series (now called Pioneers in Molecular Medicine Lectures) for outside speakers. The in house seminars are followed by faculty luncheon meetings in our Boardroom for all tenure or tenured track faculty.

Molecular Medicine accomplishments in research have been recognized by the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Craig Mello (shared with Andrew Fire of Stanford University), the 2008 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award to Victor Ambros (shared with Gary Ruvkun of Harvard and David Baulcombe of Cambridge University), the 2007 Medical Foundation Basic Science Award to David Lambright, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator appointments to Michael Green, Roger Davis, and Craig Mello, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences (Mello and Ambros) and the Royal Society of London (Davis). Many other Molecular Medicine faculty have been recognized by awards for outstanding contributions in their fields of specialty.

Two major NIH funded Centers are led by Molecular Medicine faculty and include faculty from many departments of the Medical School. The Center for AIDS Research (CFAR, http://www.umassmed.edu/cfar/index.aspx) is directed by Mario Stevenson, providing key Core facilities and integrative scientific activities for its member scientists. The Diabetes and Endocrine Research Center (DERC http://www.umassmed.edu/derc/index.aspx) directed by Michael Czech and Dale Greiner provides pilot and feasibility grants, Core facilities and an enrichment program for its broad membership. These Centers represent large clusters of faculty at the Medical School working in these fields, providing a broad scope of approaches to basic and translational research in Diabetes and HIV research.

The Program in Molecular Medicine offers within its building a broad spectrum of state-of-the-art methodologies to its laboratory groups including deep sequencing, ultrafast 3D digital imaging microscopy (wide field and TIRF) of live cells, spinning disc confocal microscopy, x-ray crystallography, mouse metabolic phenotyping, mouse knockout technology and RNAi-based gene silencing in vitro and in vivo. Medical School Core facilities also make available a large number of additional technologies such as FACS analysis, gene profiling using microarrays, proteomics and both shRNA and small molecule screening. Expertise in chemistry, structural biology, biochemistry, cell and developmental biology, molecular biology, cell signaling and regulation, genomics and proteomics, bioinformatics, genetics, immunology and virology is strongly represented in the Program in Molecular Medicine. Program faculty members are also active in the teaching of these disciplines in both core and advanced courses for graduate and medical students.

Structural biology at the UMass Medical School is supported by state-of-the-art X-ray and NMR core facilities housed in the Program in Molecular Medicine and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. Diffraction instrumentation includes three rotating anode X-ray generators equipped with R-axis IV, Mar 300 and Mar 350 image plates detectors, Osmic focusing mirrors, and nitrogen cryostreams. NMR instrumentation includes 400 MHz and 600 MHz Varian spectrometers equipped for multidimensional homonuclear and heteronuclear experiments. Computational resources include graphics workstations and multiprocessor Beowulf clusters for data processing, image reconstruction, 3D visualization, model building, refinement, molecular dynamics, and structural bioinformatics. Please see link to PMM facilities (http://www.umassmed.edu/Content.aspx?id=65390&linkidentifier=id&itemid=65390) and the x-ray core web site: http://xrayweb.umassmed.edu/

Molecular Medicine laboratory groups utilize many model organisms in their research, including yeast, worms, flies, mice and nonhuman primates. Translational research on human subjects is also vigorously pursued with collaborators in clinical departments. The laboratory groups in the Program are led by academic leaders in their respective fields of biology and medicine. The multidisciplinary nature of the Program has led to a significant number of collaborative publications by multiple laboratories. This is further enhanced by strong seminar and journal club activities as well as joint laboratory group meetings and NIH-funded program projects. Based on its success in research and teaching, the Program attracts large numbers of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and visiting scientists who in turn greatly enrich its scientific environment.