Women's Health Research at Yale is Born
In 1998, scientists observed the first direct evidence of dark energy, thought to be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. A NASA probe found frozen water on the moon’s surface. French surgeons completed the world’s first hand transplant, duplicated with more lasting success in the United States the following year. In California, Larry Page and Sergey Brin started a company they named Google.
And in New Haven, Conn., Dr. Carolyn M. Mazure was awarded a generous grant from the Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation to create Women’s Health Research at Yale, a center within Yale School of Medicine dedicated to improving well-being for all through new scientific knowledge translated into medical and personal practice.
It was the culmination of a year of detailed personal and written discussion with the foundation that began in a series of meetings with Raymond Andrews, a widely-respected lawyer, probate judge, and the then Individual Trustee of the foundation.
“This was a real meeting of the minds,” Mazure said. “Ray was truly dedicated to the language and intent of Ethel Donaghue’s will to fund projects ‘for medical research of practical benefit.’ And this was precisely what I was hoping to achieve.”
At the time, it had only been five years since President Bill Clinton signed a law requiring the inclusion of women in clinical studies seeking federal grants from the National Institutes of Health, an effort to make up for decades in which women were not routinely included in biomedical research. And it would be years still before researchers began to more fully publish studies based on the inclusion of women.
In this atmosphere, Mazure implemented her ideas about leading the study of women’s health beyond the commonly adopted bounds of reproduction to engage in interdisciplinary research covering multiple diseases and conditions that affect women as well as efforts to uncover health-related sex and gender differences that can improve the lives of women and men.
Thanks in great part to the Donaghue Foundation’s initial grant, WHRY has now entered its 20th year of stimulating Yale’s renowned research engine to explore women’s health and sex and gender differences; forging working partnerships among faculty in diverse fields to advance science and clinical practice to benefit women and men; educating junior faculty, medical students, undergraduates, and the public on the importance of fully considering sex and gender in research and personal health care decisions; and asserting a national voice to inform public health policy.
Over the years, the center has helped launch the careers of researchers such as Dr. Megan Smith — who created and built a unique neighborhood-based infrastructure for studying and responding to the health needs of the community. It has been the scientific home for major NIH grants, including Specialized Centers of Research focusing on sex differences in the pernicious effects of stress on health outcomes. It has hosted scientific trailblazers such as Dr. David C. Page, Director of the Whitehead Institute — who is a leader in human genetics showing us that sex chromosomes within every human cell play an essential role in reading one’s genome. And it is changing the future of medical education with dedicated and accomplished faculty such as Dr. Njeri Thande, a talented cardiologist who is integrating the study of sex and gender into the medical school’s curriculum.
Moreover, WHRY’s studies have, for example, shown that a treatment for autism to help children become more socially engaged — which was never previously tested with girls — works better in girls than boys, revealed new data on critical breast cancer risk detection techniques, and are discovering if a virus that has been shown to eliminate a type of brain tumor can also be effective in treating ovarian cancer.
Over the years, WHRY has provided grant funding for more than 80 pilot projects, research studies that benefit women or explore sex and gender differences requiring preliminary data to obtain larger external grants. Additional forward-thinking foundations and private donors have joined the Donaghue Foundation in this core endeavor. So far, the center’s $4.9 million in pilot grants has allowed its investigators to earn $85 million in external funding to advance the research in their labs and clinical research settings.
Starting with this issue of “Innovations in Women’s Health,” we will look back at some of the many success stories among the researchers who contributed to this unique and often groundbreaking body of work. We will recap their WHRYfunded studies, examine the findings, see where the work has led them all these years later, and where they suspect it will lead them next.
Starting with this issue of “Innovations in Women’s Health,” we will look back at some of the many success stories among the researchers who contributed to this unique and often groundbreaking body of work.
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“It’s almost hard to believe we are approaching our 20th anniversary,” Mazure said. “We have accomplished so much since my first meeting with Ray Andrews. And we have so much more exciting work yet to come.”
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For questions, please contact Rick Harrison, Communications Officer, at 203-764-6610 or rick.harrison@yale.edu.