Message from the Vice Chair for Research
Research in the Department of Medicine begins with a clinical problem that has no good answer yet.
This year, these problems included a heart muscle stiffened by misfolded protein, a liver quietly scarring in a patient who came in for something else, and a lupus flare that has not responded to any of our medications. Our investigators pursue these questions because they encounter them in clinic, and because the distance from the laboratory bench to the patient’s bedside is short here, often a single corridor.
Fiscal Year 2026 was a demanding year for biomedical research nationally. Federal competition intensified, and review cycles grew less predictable. Despite this, our enterprise held and then grew. Total research funding reached a departmental record, and our faculty sustained a portfolio spanning basic mechanisms, first-in-human trials, and the health of communities across South Carolina. Specifics of these accomplishments appear on the following page. What they represent is harder to tabulate: grant applications written after clinic, protocols revised for the eleventh time, and patients who consented to a trial without knowing whether it would help them.
Three commitments shape how we intend to build from here. We will protect time for early-career investigators, because a K award defended today is an R01 a decade from now. We will keep our trials open to the patients most often excluded from them, including those with comorbid disease and those who live far from Charleston. And we will keep asking questions that cross division lines, because the biology rarely respects them. The work described in these pages belongs to our faculty, our trainees, and the people who trusted us with their care.
Jim Oates, M.D.
Vice Chair for Research
Department of Medicine
