History

The Institute for Fundamental Biomedical Research (IFBR) was established in 2018 to coincide with the opening of the Research and Education Building (REB)on the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital (JHACH) campus. At that time, a cohort of six biomedical research scientists (Drs. Komatsu, Nagy, Osborne, Perera, Poy, and Zhou) were hired to “seed” the research enterprise that was envisioned to grow to a stable and sustainable independent program of 15-20 investigators that filled the REB. Drs. Osborne and Nagy were two senior investigators of the initial group of investigators who have worked together with JHACH and JHU Medicine leadership to achieve this goal.

Our strategic goal was to build a program with close partnerships with our basic science colleagues on the Baltimore campuses of JHU. Our next recruiting strategy was to focus on colleagues with research interests related to fundamental metabolism in a broad sense. This approach was chosen to leverage the research expertise of our founding faculty with the realization that most, if not all, biomedical processes intersect with metabolism at some level.  We hired two new faculty members in 2021, Drs. Ruan and Trapecar, and in 2024 Dr. Sawada opened the doors to her new lab.  We look forward to future recruiting efforts to achieve a critical mass of research labs. We are also eager to partner with our clinical and translational research colleagues within the other Institutes and Departments within JHACH to hire additional research focused colleagues over the next several years to form strong basic-translational partnerships that build on the interests and expertise of our clinical partners.