Tangible results

Gifts to the university’s Campaign for VCU support life-changing research, ultimately improving patient care

When Stanley and Dorothy Pauley donated $5 million through the Pauley Family Foundation to the Campaign for VCU, their contribution aimed to expand the Virginia Commonwealth University Heart Center’s staff and capabilities and, ultimately, improve patient care.

Their donation was just one of many integral gifts made to the Campaign for VCU that support life-changing research and improvements in patient care.

Dr. Antonio Abbate, assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, said his research at the Pauley Heart Center would not have been possible without private funding.

“As a young researcher, it is very difficult to access federal funding and, therefore, donated funds are often the only source for us,” Abbate said. “Without this kind of generosity, I think that research will experience a great crisis.”

Dr. George Vetrovec, the Kimmerling Professor and Chair of Cardiology who leads the Pauley Heart Center, said private support helps recruit rising stars such as Abbate.

“The support of the Pauley family is invaluable in providing financial resources for start-up costs while Dr. Abbate is becoming established,” he said. “It also raises the profile of our work, and combined with our ongoing clinical and investigative teamwork, it makes us a very attractive partner for other institutions.”

Those partnerships yielded tangible results last year when doctors at the Pauley Heart Center performed the first artificial heart implant on the East Coast. The implanted device, known as the TAH-t, supported the circulatory system and organs of a Virginia man with end-stage heart failure while he waited for a donor heart to become available. The VCU Medical Center is one of just 10 hospitals worldwide certified to implant the TAH-t, which is the only total artificial heart approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

With 64 million Americans battling cardiovascular disease and more than 930,000 of them dying from the disease each year, private gifts that advance research are essential to winning the fight against the nation’s leading cause of death, Vetrovec said.

“Dr. Abbate’s work will establish a link between basic science laboratory work and the application of new ideas in the clinical realm, thus translating basic science into clinical advances and moving the field forward,” Vetrovec said.

In the past 30 years, Abbate said, mortality rates for heart attacks have dropped from 40 percent to 10 percent.

“If it weren’t for research efforts, we would still be practicing medicine as we did 40 years ago,” Abbate said. “Experience has proven that many past treatments were more harmful than beneficial, and that overall direct experience — research — is more valuable than opinion. We now have great drugs and treatments, but we need to continue testing them in order to be sure of their safety and effectiveness, and we need to look for even better ones.”

Dr. Jerome F. Strauss, dean of the School of Medicine, thinks improved patient care is tied directly to scientists’ abilities to explore new areas of groundbreaking research.

“Increased funding provides new opportunities for our doctors, allowing them to take innovations uncovered in the lab and apply them at the patient’s bedside,” Strauss said. “With new communication and collaborations between bench researchers and physicians — like we see in the Pauley Heart Center — we can create partnerships and a more vigorous atmosphere for translational research.”