Due to the commitment of AIMS’ senior clinicians, scientists and faculty towards research, it has been possible to establish a nascent clinical and scientific research centre with support from funding agencies. Realizing the importance of impressive scientific advances and their translation to potential improvement in clinical management, AIMS has made a commitment to establishing a first class research facility. The depth and breadth of patients with different diseases that are available in India makes it strategically possible to do excellent research. Increasingly, research centres have been developed where molecular biology is intimately associated with clinical research and there is synergy between the two.

The establishment of the Institute of Molecular Medicine provides clinicians and the scientists with adequate infrastructure to conduct good quality research and enables fundamental questions to clinical problems to be addressed in detail. Further, because of the expense of doing good quality scientific research, the establishment of such a centre allows pooling of resources and sharing of common facilities between different groups. The future training of doctors and nurses is going to be quite different given the advances that are going to be made in the next twenty years and such a research centre will facilitate in their training. The entire society in the southern region of India shall stand to gain from the proposed research centre. Also, the institute can be developed into a referral centre for other research laboratories within India

Philosophy

An objective of the Institute of Molecular Medicine is to have a balance between scientists who are interested in basic research and applied scientists. This is partly because basic scientists look at the problems in a different way and also enable the development of new technologies to address problems that are relevant in clinical medicine. Clinically oriented scientists bring a different angle to investigate the problem primarily from the knowledge base of clinical issues. Together with the research scientist, clinical scientists can make good contributions to the development of research in a particular area. The institute plans to appoint personnel in the short term who are enthusiastic, well rounded and academically oriented on a tenure track basis to allow for turn over, with the appointments being made permanent at the end of a proper, rigorous scientific review after five to six years.