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Impact

Impact of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center on Georgia

• The WHSC helps make Emory University the largest employer in DeKalb County and the third largest private employer in metro Atlanta.
• With $2.5 billion in operating expenses, the WHSC’s annual economic impact on metro Atlanta is estimated at $5.7 billion.
• Strategic areas of investment in the WHSC include comprehensive centers in cancer, heart and vascular health, transplant, and neurosciences. Areas in which centers are under development include aging, palliative care, informatics, critical care, and imaging.
• Since the 1990s, the WHSC has helped Emory bring more than $775 million into Georgia in licensing revenues from drugs, diagnostics, devices, and consumer products. Currently, more than 50 products are in various stages of development or regulatory approval, with 27 having reached the marketplace and 12 more in human clinical trials. Over the past decade, Emory has launched 47 start-up companies.
• WHSC's physicians provide $48.9 million annually in charity care through Emory Healthcare and another $23.1 million in uncompensated care at Grady Memorial Hospital. Emory is a preeminent provider of specialty care to indigent children in Georgia.
• The WHSC received $446.5 million in sponsored research funds last year. Major recent grants include $16 million (NIH) to improve the effectiveness of vaccines, $14.5 million (NIH) for a multicenter, phase 3 study of progesterone for traumatic brain-injury (a treatment developed at Emory), $8.1 million (Gates Foundation) to improve maternal and newborn survival in rural Ethiopia, and $3 million (NIH) for research to prevent and control cardiometabolic disease in South Asia.
• Emory’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center opened a new veterinary medicine research building in 2009. A new building for Rollins School of Public Health is scheduled to open this year. Plans also are under way for construction of a new building that includes pediatric research shared with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
• Emory is a member of the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA), a partnership of business, research universities, and state government that fosters economic development. Through the GRA, the state invests in WHSC research in nanotechnology, screening for new drugs, vaccines, cancer, AIDS, immunology, biomedical informatics, and neuropharmacology.
• Winship Cancer Institute is a key participant in the Georgia Cancer Coalition, which invests in cancer research at Emory and works to make the latest advances in care available to all Georgians. Winship also works with the Georgia Center for Oncology Research and Education to partner with community-based physicians to make more clinical trials of new treatments available to patients throughout the state.
• The Emory Vaccine Center is one of the largest academic vaccine centers in the world, with scientists working on vaccines for AIDS, malaria, hepatitis C, flu, and other diseases. Emory’s Hope Clinic, which conducts clinical trials for promising vaccines, is part of the country’s premier networks for vaccine and prevention trials for infectious diseases.
• Emory is the lead partner in the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute, an NIH-funded collaborative created to increase availability and enhance efficiency of clinical trials for patients.
• The Center for Health Discovery and Well-Being in the Emory-Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute is currently studying healthy participants to determine disease risk and predict health outcomes.
• The WHSC helps lead Emory's Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response, created to improve Emory’s ability to deliver a coordinated and effective response to catastrophic events. 
• Emory provides medical direction of Grady Health System's Ponce de Leon Center, one of the largest, most comprehensive AIDS treatment centers in the country. Emory is also a primary site in the nation's premier NIH-funded AIDS clinical trials network.