David B. Hellmann,
MD, MACP
Despite the many challenges in our world, we have much to celebrate and be grateful for, this spring of 2022. For starters, I am immensely appreciative to the loyal supporters of the Center for Innovative Medicine who have joined together to establish a professorship in my name, which will support CIM’s mission in perpetuity. What an honor! Typically, we would host a large event to celebrate the generosity of our donors who have made this momentous gift possible. While COVID-19 continues to restrict these plans for now, rest assured that we will indeed host a celebration as soon as safety allows. I should also note that this is the fourth named professorship for the CIM, and at last count, we can boast 47 funded CIM Scholars — a clear indication that CIM’s stock is on the rise.
Another indication of that “rising stock” is the enthusiasm we are seeing for CIM’s new Initiative to Humanize Medicine, our ambitious effort to unite researchers from disciplines and divisions across Johns Hopkins University in a far-reaching effort to better equip clinicians to get to know their patients as people. Already, the initiative is attracting significant support that I will describe more fully in the fall.
In similar fashion, the CIM-supported Human Aging Project (HAP) is flourishing, thanks to generous early support from donors including the Charles Salisbury Family, Sarah Miller Coulson, and Ethan and Karen Leder, who had the foresight to see the potential HAP holds to dramatically extend years of good health for our rapidly graying population. Seed funding from these and other donors has allowed our researchers to embark on projects that have subsequently garnered millions of dollars in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health and other funding agencies. Success begets success!
You’ll read about many of these CIM success stories in the pages that follow, and I hope that the tremendous promise all of this work holds — promise for humanizing medicine and advancing medicine as a public trust — will “fill your tank” with hope and excitement for the future.
David B. Hellmann, M.D., M.A.C.P.
Aliki Perroti Professorof Medicine
