BusinessReport.com

The clinical use of radical human genome research will be one benefit that Tulane University School of Medicine will bring to the area through its recently inked partnership with Baton Rouge General. Dr. Benjamin Sachs, dean of Tulane’s medical school, says the plan to eventually base 160 third- and fourth-year medical students in a $10 million building at the General’s Mid-City campus could give the region status as a locus of medical academics on par with Chicago, home to top 20-ranked health research programs at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, and the Bay Area, home to top 10-ranked UCSF Medical Center and Stanford University.

Sachs, who discussed the partnership with Mayor Kip Holden today in Baton Rouge, says the new Tulane building would host medical students, a nursing school and the University of Louisiana-Monroe College of Pharmacy and would need a $5 million endowment on top of the construction cost. Sachs says the building would include “state-of-the-art connectivity” to enable telemedicine care, which would let local specialists consult with distant patients via videoconferencing. A similar telemedicine system linking California’s rural heartland with urban health centers was helped along by the state legislature, something Sachs hopes to duplicate here. “It was incredibly cheap to do in California,” he says, noting that “insurance companies really like it” because computerized medical records are instantly updated through integrated telemedicine networking.

Sachs says the human genome project, which chronicled the complex DNA of a person but took 13 years and cost $2.6 billion, has allowed advances that mean a patient soon will be able to have his or her genetic code read in four minutes for $1,000. That kind of research, which Sachs says he has made a priority at Tulane, can let physicians predict what kind of cancers someone could be prone to and can predict rare drug complications in newborns. “This could change the face of medicine more than the advent of penicillin,” Sachs says.

Although the General has had “a handful” of medical residents since 1990, Sachs says the new partnership with Tulane, along with the recent announcement that LSU will base medical grad students at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center on Essen Lane, will create “two major academic medical centers that will compete nicely—but that’s OK—” in the next several years and will benefit the community in “dramatic” ways.