June 04, 2010 02:09am EST 

The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA has become one of the nation’s elite medicals schools in just over 50 years since its inception, something that many top medical schools cannot boast. With its expertise and impact on the medical community during a period of revolutionary change in biomedical research and patient care, the David Geffen School of Medicine quickly moved to the forefront of academic medicine and discovery. It now ranks among the best with institutions that are known as the best in the world, some of which are twice UCLA’s age.
In 2002, Mr. David Geffen announced a $200 million unrestricted endowment for the school and the school thus was named. With the endowment, the school competes in perpetuity with the finest medical institutions in the world regardless of economic climate, can offer financial support to enroll the finest students regardless of need, and develop new research and clinical programs.
Today, the school boasts over 2,000 faculty members, almost 1,300 residents, more than 750 medical students and almost 400 Ph.D candidates. Approximately half of all the students in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, as well as more than 200 members of its faculty, participate on a personal level in community service. They have been ranked the “Best in the West” by U.S. News and World Report in a survey of the best hospitals in America for twenty consecutive years. Additionally, the medical school is ranked ninth in the country in research funding and third in research dollars from all sources.
As research is one of the most important things to the David Geffen School of Medicine, they focus much of their resources on finding breaking discoveries relevant to the medical community. In recent news, researchers from the UCLA AIDS Institute and colleagues have demonstrated, for the first time, that human blood stem cells can be engineered into cells that can target and kill HIV-infected cells. The research could potentially be used against a range of chronic viral diseases.
The study provides a demonstration of feasibility that human stem cells can be engineered into the equivalent of a genetic vaccine.
“We have demonstrated in this proof-of-principle study that this type of approach can be used to engineer the human immune system, particularly the T-cell response, to specifically target HIV-infected cells,” said lead investigator Scott G. Kitchen, assistant professor of medicine in the division of hematology and oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the UCLA AIDS Institute. “These studies lay the foundation for further therapeutic development that involves restoring damaged or defective immune responses toward a variety of viruses that cause chronic disease, or even different types of tumors.”
The research is but one example of the many medical discoveries and breakthroughs that the UCLA medical research team can boast.
The David Geffen School of Medicine offers fresh perspectives on solutions to complex and pressing challenges, making it one of the best investments in higher education today. With their ground-breaking research, top faculty, great fellowships, and generous scholarships, the school stands proudly among the nations elite medical schools.