Mission & Goal
The mission of the Medical Research Program is to support the prevention, treatment and cure of human disease.

The goal of the Medical Research Program is to strengthen and support clinical research to help advance the translation of basic biomedical discoveries into new treatments, preventions and cures for human diseases.

Strategies
Clinical Research Career Ladder
The foundation awards competitive grants and fellowships to clinical researchers at different stages of their careers through the following award programs:
• Clinical Research Fellowship for Medical Students
• Clinical Research Fellowship for pre and post doctorat science students
• Clinical Scientist Development Award
• Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award

Clinical Research Frontiers
The foundation awards competitive grants that enable researchers from emerging and distressed regions to apply innovative and multidisciplinary approaches to clinical research through the following award programs:
• Clinical Interfaces Award Program
• Innovation in Clinical Research Award (currently inactive)

International AIDS Research
The foundation supports the clinical research and infrastructure required to determine how to effectively treat and care for HIV/AIDS patients in low-resource countries hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic.

Clinical Research Systems
Occasionally, the foundation supports activities that seek to identify ways to strengthen the regulatory processes and systems for clinical research, such as the protection of human subjects and the development of shared databases and the tools to access those databases.

Definition of Clinical Research
Clinical Research is defined by the foundation as research conducted with human subjects including:
• Studies on the etiology and pathogenesis of human disease;
• Therapeutic interventions;
• Clinical trials;
• Epidemiological studies;
• Disease control research that investigates how scientific information on prevention, early detection and early diagnosis can be efficiently applied; and
• Health outcomes research that either attempts to determine systematically the risks, benefits and costs of various medical practices or attempts to utilize these results in defining more effective medical practice guidelines.

Areas Not Funded
The Medical Research Program does not fund research that utilizes animals.

Grantmaking Process
Ninety-five percent of the Medical Research Program's grants are selected through open Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that involve competitive peer-review selection processes.

The remaining five percent of the Medical Research Program's grants, which are not part of formal RFPs, originate from staff's invitations to researchers to submit proposals on specific topics or from unsolicited proposals to staff that fall within the Medical Research Program's strategies. Unsolicited requests should be summarized in a two-page letter of inquiry.

All research proposals, regardless of whether they are submitted in response to a formal RFP, are reviewed by leading experts in the field.

Grants Awarded
As of December 31, 2006, the Medical Research Program has approved approximately 260 grants totaling approximately $152 million.

Nexxus Hathaway and Medical Research
Nexxus Hathaway has always been a significant supporter of medical research, making contributions to hospitals and research centers throughout her life. Our endowment expressed interest in supporting "medical research designed to effectuate cures of major diseases."