The exciting past, present and future of UF Scripps Biomedical Research.
- 2022 will mark the 18th year since the launch of Scripps Florida. The three-building campus off Donald Ross Road in Jupiter, Florida has been open since 2009.
- Since its founding, our research enterprise has returned more than $6 for every dollar the state and Palm Beach County have invested.
- From 2013 to 2020, the institute’s annual expenditures averaged nearly $90 million.
- In April 2022, Scripps Florida took the next logical step in its development, becoming UF Scripps Biomedical Research, reflecting the campus’ integration into the University of Florida’s academic health center, UF Health. The transition enables UF Scripps to more seamlessly accelerate the translation of basic scientific discoveries into clinical advances that benefit human health.
- UF Scripps scientists have shown extraordinary inventiveness and entrepreneurialism, producing more than 170 clusters of patents, with each containing 1 to 6 patent applications since the institute launched.
- The institute’s scientists spun off an average of one new biotechnology business per year. One invention, from the lab of Chistoph Rader, Ph.D., helped lead to the development of a novel antibody-drug combination against aggressive cancers currently in clinical trials at MD Anderson and other sites. Other UF Scripps scientists have launched companies now focused on moving potential breakthrough treatments for HIV, Parkinson’s, ALS and a form of muscular dystrophy toward clinical trials.
- The institute’s commitment to high-impact science educational opportunities for people of all backgrounds is ironclad. Nearly 200 Palm Beach County high school students and science teachers have trained at our campus during summer internships, thanks to the generosity of the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust. Another 300 FAU Wilkes Honors College students have spent up to three semesters gathering data for their theses in our labs, learning from the institute’s scientists.
- This year, UF Scripps will launch yet another on-ramp for pursuit of careers in science, with the start of the PREP, the Postbaccalaureate Research and Education Program. PREP is an immersive, yearlong research experience geared toward recent bachelor’s degree recipients who seek to increase their academic and laboratory skills in preparation for application to high-caliber, research-oriented Ph.D. programs.
- The Florida branch of the Skaggs Graduate School of Chemical and Biological Sciences continues to operate at the institute. It has grown to include approximately 85 doctoral students, taught by nearly 40 faculty members in Florida, in close collaboration with graduate school faculty from Scripps Research in California.
- The UF Scripps campus houses unique and extraordinary technological and drug-discovery resources for scientists. These include the molecular imaging center, equipped with cryo-electron microscopy, the robotic high-throughput molecular screening center with a library of hundreds of thousands of drug-like molecules, and the Natural Products Discovery Center, where scientists mine a historic collection of microbe samples for genomic clues of biological potential to treat human diseases.