By Jeff Hansel
jhansel@postbulletin.com
Mayo Clinic and the state of Florida announced a research partnership this morning between Florida State University and the clinic’s Florida arm.
With the announcement, Mayo now has partnerships with state universities at all three of its campuses in Minnesota, Florida and Arizona.
A stated goal of the Florida partnership is to improve health-care outcomes for all Americans.
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"In the spirit of cooperation and collaboration, we can work together to accomplish results that we expect will have a significant impact on health care well beyond our state," FSU President T.K. Wetherell said in the university’s announcement.
Increasingly, Mayo Foundation nationally has relied on partnerships to accomplish research it can’t do on its own.
The Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics has begun bearing fruit just five years after its inception.
Already, Minnesota Partnership researchers at the University of Minnesota and Mayo in Rochester have received federal grants, published research papers and sent a product to a private company for mass production so enough will be available for clinical trials. The Partnership laboratory headquarters sits atop Mayo’s Vincent A. Stabile Building in Rochester.
Mayo in Arizona has also partnered with Arizona State University. That partnership has led to a collaborative nurse training program, shared professorships and a college program that allows Mayo medical students to get both a medical and a law degree.
The Florida partnership will give Mayo researchers access to FSU’s National High Magnetic Field Laboratory "where they will have the opportunity to study proteins that play key roles in disease in new ways — through the lens of a magnetic field more than a million times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field," the university announcement says.
FSU highlighted one of its research projects under development called the Clinical Research Network.
Through that project, Mayo scientists will gain access to more than 1,200 doctors and their 1.5 million patients, whose characteristics include various illnesses, ages and other demographics.
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FSU also highlighted what it will get out of the deal: Access to "the first and largest integrated, not-for-profit group medical practice in the world" with almost 50,000 employees nationally and more than 6,000 "actively involved in medical research, translating discoveries from the laboratory into improved patient care."
