Cedars-Sinai is the largest nonprofit hospital in the western United States. This tertiary care facility has over 2,000 medical staff members, 9,000 employees, 2,000 volunteers, and 15,000 funding support group members serving the Los Angeles area. Cedars-Sinai is located in the densely populated city of West Hollywood. As with all of Los Angeles, there is substantial ethnic diversity in the Cedars-Sinai catchment area. Biomedical education is an integral function of the Cedars-Sinai commitment to developing excellent patient care. Cedars-Sinai is a major teaching facility of the David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM) at UCLA, with over 240 full-time faculty members in ten different departments who participate in the training of medical students, interns, residents, and fellows. In addition to contributing to the teaching of DGSOM medical students, Cedars-Sinai faculty teach over 300 residents and fellows in nearly 60 graduate medical education programs on site. Cedars-Sinai has one of the largest state-of-the-art clinical research facilities of any private hospital in the nation, under the purview and oversight of the Burns and Allen Research Institute. It includes over 270,000 square feet of laboratory and laboratory support space, including the seven-story, 216,000 square foot, state-of-the-art Barbara and Marvin Davis Research Building, adjacent to the main hospital. This facility has a vivarium and operating rooms solely for research purposes. Core facilities funded by a NIH grant provide specialized clinical research trial services. Cedars-Sinai ranks among the top 10 non-university hospitals nationwide receiving research funding from the NIH. In the past 5 years, the Research Institute has doubled the amount of extramural research expenditures to almost $60 million per year (receiving more than $36 million in federal funding in Fiscal Year 2008), and in the past 2 years has been granted 23 new patents.
Cedars-Sinai has an active clinical and translational research program embodied by the NIH-funded GCRC, established 12 years ago as a satellite of the Harbor-LA BioMed GCRC. The GCRC provides clinical research infrastructure for investigators who receive their main research support from federal and other national, as well as international, agencies. Cedars-Sinai has steadily and successfully developed research resources and infrastructure, and a number of institutes, research centers, and core facilities have been created. Current institutes established and in operation include the Immunobiology Institute, Gene Therapeutics Research Institute, Medical Genetics Institute, Women's Cancer Research Institute, and International Stem Cell Research Institute, and two newly established research institutes include the Heart Institute and the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Research Institute.
