The Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis honored longtime benefactors George and Debra Couch at a dedication ceremony Oct. 6 after the couple committed $10 million to support the school's personalized medicine research initiatives.
The dedication ceremony marked the naming of the Debra and George W. Couch III Biomedical Research Building, which comprises the Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology, the Washington University Center for Cellular Imaging, the Washington University Center for Multiple Myeloma Nanotherapy, the Optical Radiology Lab, the Molecular Imaging Center and research space for the Center of Regenerative Medicine and the departments of medicine and radiology.
Officials said the $10 million gift will also go toward establishing an endowed fund dedicated toward personalized medicine initiatives. Along with the Debra and George W. Couch III Biomedical Research Building, the fund will also support the Genome Engineering and Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Center. With the funding, the center's researchers will be able to invest in research focused on patient care, such as gene-editing tools like CRISPR-Cas9 technology.
The Genome Engineering Center offers support to labs and programs across the university's campus to advance personalized medicine research.
"The field of genome engineering has advanced extraordinarily rapidly," said Jeffrey D. Milbrandt, MD, PhD, the genetics professor who established the Genome Engineering Center. "The idea behind our center is to provide these rapidly evolving and sophisticated technologies to many investigators, so that these techniques do not need to be implemented in each individual lab."