A $5 million gift that helped push Northwestern’s $1.4 billion fund-raising campaign past its goal will be used to create a new laboratory to study infectious diseases and viruses at the Feinberg School of Medicine.
The money was donated by the Drucker Family Foundation in January through the Midwest AIDS Foundation/Engle Fund and “grew out of a relationship with the Drucker family,” said Penny Hunt, NU’s associate vice president for university development.
The $5 millon donation will be monitored by the AIDS foundation, another beneficiary of Drucker funds, Hunt said.
Feinberg has raised about $472 million of the $1.45 billion raised thus far for Campaign Northwestern — which is scheduled to end Aug. 31.
The donation will fund the Fred and Norman A. Drucker Virology Research Laboratories, which will occupy the twelfth floor of the Robert H. Lurie Medical Center on the Chicago Campus, scheduled for completion in 2004.
“The building is incredibly important because all the major progress in curing disease has grown out of research conducted in medical schools,” Hunt said.
Hunt said that the development of such research facilities “has direct effect on the discovery of cures.”
According to Hunt, the modern facilities will also enable to the medical school faculty to keep up with changing trends in technology and medicine.
“We need a state-of-the art facility and can only provide that with a gift like this,” Hunt said.
The lab itself will focus on the research of infectious diseases, with an emphasis on HIV/AIDS and emerging infections, said Lewis Landsberg, Feinberg’s dean and vice president for medical affairs.
“You can’t do research like this without a specialized facility that has the proper facilities for dealing with infected agents,” Landsberg said.
Such a facility will also aid medical school administrators in their quest to find a new chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology because it will “further develop our area of infectious diseases,” Landsberg said.
Landsberg said this area is one in which the Feinberg faculty has “excelled” and hopes the gift will allow for additional future successes.
“(The gift) builds and leverages that strength,” he said. “It will help us develop bigger and better programs.”
