| Liberty Media Corp. chairman and Johns Hopkins alumnus John C. Malone has given the university’s Whiting School of Engineering $30 million for a building where researchers will collaborate with colleagues from other Johns Hopkins divisions to learn to tailor therapies for individual patients and devise systems-based approaches to some of society’s biggest problems. The gift, the largest ever to the Whiting School, will fund construction of a 56,000-square-foot research building on the university’s Homewood campus. Malone Hall will house two planned interdisciplinary research efforts in which the Whiting School will have a leadership role: It will be the home of the Systems Institute and the Homewood base for Johns Hopkins’ emerging initiative in individualized health. “We are deeply grateful to John Malone for this truly transformational gift,” said Ronald J. Daniels, the university’s president. “Scientists from all across Johns Hopkins will join together in Malone Hall, building on the foundation laid by the Whiting School’s own engineers, mathematicians and computational scientists. Together, they will attack important problems from a variety of perspectives; that kind of collaboration is what makes breakthroughs happen.” The initiative in individualized health is expected to bring together engineers, life scientists and medical researchers from across Johns Hopkins. They will focus on bringing information science into the practice of medicine, with an initial emphasis on cancer, in a manner that will allow an unprecedented focus on treatment designed for the individual patient. The approach grows out of the recognition that genetic and epigenetic differences among patients explain, at least in part, why traditionally developed drugs help some people and not others. |
