The medical school as research campus: IU School of Medicine–South Bend

1968–PRESENT · BOUNDARY — SOUTH BEND, AT NOTRE DAME · ROW 3

No medical school stands in the CDP — the schools file tests the ground whole and finds no college at all — but the branch school that teaches this ground's physicians is a research campus in its own right, and this article prints its own identity, not its parent's: the Indiana University School of Medicine began offering classes in South Bend in 1968, as a pilot program teaching basic medical sciences on the Notre Dame campus — with a parallel pilot at Purdue, the beginning of IU's statewide system of medical education. The partnership found a permanent home in Raclin-Carmichael Hall, dedicated in October 2005 directly across from the Notre Dame campus, housing IUSM–South Bend alongside Notre Dame's W. M. Keck Center for Transgene Research and shared research space; Harper Hall followed, dedicated 8 March 2011, housing the Mike and Josie Harper Cancer Research Institute — a joint Notre Dame–IU institute built on Charles M. Harper's $10 million gift, matched by $10 million in state appropriation, for collaborative cancer research in cancer biology, genomics and proteomics, with emphasis on breast, prostate and colon cancers.

The campus's named research lines, at the strength of the institutions' own records, are these. Rudolph M. Navari — assistant dean and director of IUSM–South Bend, and director of the campus's cancer institute — leads the clinical-research line whose practice-changing trial is this section's Row 8 article. David L. Boone, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at IUSM–South Bend (2014–present at the campus; adjunct professor of biology at Notre Dame), runs the Boone laboratory on the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease, colon cancer and obesity — including a knockout-mouse line susceptible to IBD and resistant to diet-induced obesity, and work on how the intestinal microbiome and epithelial NF-κB signaling drive colitis. The campus's imaging and flow-cytometry core and its Freimann Life Sciences Center annex for animal modelling, shared through Raclin-Carmichael and Harper Hall, are the instrument layer under those lines, and its students take research places at Harper and at Notre Dame's Eck Institute for Global Health.

The mosquito-genome line that the audit template expects of a branch campus belongs, on this ground, to the partner university rather than the school, and prints at that attribution: Frank H. Collins, Clark Professor of Biology at Notre Dame (1997–2019), built his laboratory on genome-level studies of Anopheles gambiae, the principal African malaria vector — isolating, at the National Institutes of Health in the 1980s, a strain of the mosquito able to kill the malaria parasite — directed the NIH contract for the web-based bioinformatics resource for arthropod-vector genomes, and founded the global-health initiative that became Notre Dame's Eck Institute. One templated line is excluded by name: the siderophore-export discovery — the MmpS4/MmpS5 secretion system essential to Mycobacterium tuberculosis virulence (2013) — is the work of Michael Niederweis's laboratory at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, with collaborators at Sanford Burnham and elsewhere; no IUSM–South Bend investigator appears in it, and it does not enter this county's record. A bacterial-cell-wall program of the template's pattern likewise verifies at IU Bloomington, not at this campus, and is not claimed here. The branch school's research identity is smaller than the template and entirely its own: cancer, gut immunology, and — through the Notre Dame partnership across the street — the genomics of the malaria mosquito.

Sources:

1. IU Institutional Memory, "A Model of Collaboration in the Search for a Cure: The Dedication of Harper Hall" (8 March 2011) — the 1968 pilot, Raclin-Carmichael Hall (2005), Harper Hall and the Harper Cancer Research Institute.
2. IU School of Medicine news release, "Groundbreaking ceremony for Harper Hall Nov. 21" — the $10 million Harper gift matched by $10 million state appropriation; genomics/proteomics and breast, prostate and colon emphases; Navari as IUSM–South Bend director.
3. IU School of Medicine–South Bend faculty record and Notre Dame Department of Biological Sciences, David Boone laboratory pages — the IBD / colon cancer / obesity lines, the knockout and transgenic models.
4. Notre Dame Department of Biological Sciences, Frank Collins page, and Notre Dame Magazine, "Deaths in the Family" — Collins's Anopheles gambiae genome and malaria-vector work, the NIH vector-genome resource contract, the Eck Institute founding.
5. Wells et al., "Discovery of a Siderophore Export System Essential for Virulence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis," PLoS Pathogens (2013), and the Springer Nature Research Communities account — the siderophore-export record, attributed to the Niederweis laboratory, UAB; printed here as the exclusion.