The Duke University School of Medicine, commonly known as Duke Med, is the medical school of Duke University. It is located in the Collegiate Gothic-style West Campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The School of Medicine, along with the Duke University School of Nursing, Duke University Hospital, Duke Regional Hospital, Duke Children's Hospital, Duke Raleigh Hospital, and other affiliated hospitals, clinics, and laboratories, make up the Duke University Health System. Established in 1925 by James B. Duke, the School of Medicine has earned its reputation as an integral part of one of the world's foremost patient care and biomedical research institutions.
Clinical rotations by medical students and residents occur within the Duke University Health System, a fully integrated academic health care system encompassing a tertiary-care hospital and specialty clinics on the Medical Center campus, two community hospitals, a VA hospital, home health and hospice services, a network of primary care physicians, and other affiliated partners across the SE United States. The School of Medicine is currently ranked third in the country for research, while Duke University Hospital is consistently ranked among the top 20 of some 5,700 American hospitals by U.S. News & World Report. Furthermore, the School of Medicine is especially noted for its groundbreaking biomedical research, bringing in more than $700 million in NIH-sponsored projects in 2021.
History
The idea of establishing a medical school at the current site dates back as far as 1891, when John Franklin Crowell, the president of Trinity College as it was known at the time, first announced a public plan to establish a school of medicine.
In 1924, James B. Duke established the Duke Endowment and directed $40 million to Trinity College to become Duke University. The following year, he made an additional request to establish the Duke School of Medicine, Duke School of Nursing, and Duke Hospital, with the goal of improving health care in the Carolinas and nationwide. Three thousand applicants applied to the new medical school in 1929 and 70 first- and third-year students were selected, including four women, for the School's inaugural class. Just four years after its establishment, Duke was ranked among the top 20 medical schools in the country by the AAMC.
Timeline of select research and patient care milestones
1937—Barnes Woodall establishes the nation's first brain tumor program. 1968—Robert Lefkowitz describes the adrenaline receptor. 1972—Child safety cap requirements championed by Jay Arena enacted as federal law. 1982—Pediatric immunologist Rebecca Buckley uses bone marrow transplantation to restore the immune systems of children born with severe combined immunodeficiency, also known as bubble boy disease. 1984—Bart Haynes contributes to the identification of HTLV-III, now known as HIV. 1990—Joanne Kurtzberg establishes the Duke Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Program. 1994—Louise Markert demonstrates that babies born with no immune system, a fatal condition known as complete DiGeorge syndrome, can be cured with thymus transplantation. 1995—Duke scientists link the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes to breast and ovarian cancers. 2001—Miguel Nicolelis develops a system that allows monkeys to control robot arms via brain signals, an important step to enable paralyzed people to control neuroprosthetic limbs. 2006—YT Chen and Priya Kishnani develop Myozyme as the first treatment for Pompe’s disease. 2011—Hai Yan leads a team of scientists from Duke and Johns Hopkins universities to identify mutations in a gene that makes cells immortal and appear to play a pivotal role in three of the most common types of brain tumors, as well as cancers of the liver, tongue and urinary tract. 2013—Duke researcher Jeffery Lawson and Laura Niklason of Yale School of Medicine, develop a bioengineered blood vessel, which Lawson grafted into an artery in a Duke patient’s arm, the first in-human procedure of its kind in the United States. 2015—Clinical trials using PVS-RIPO, a modified polio virus, to activate the host immune system to fight glioblastomas was featured on 60 Minutes. Preliminary findings have reported limited efficacy. 2019—Forty-five faculty members were named as some of the most highly cited researchers on a global list from Clarivate Analytics and Web of Science, placing Duke SOM in a three-way tie as the 8th ranked institution in the nation. These faculty include Robert Leifkowitz, Robert Califf, Jason Locasale, and Darell Bigner.