Salt Lake City: Livability in the 21st Century

The University of Utah is
ranked among the top thirty
public research universities in the
nation with particular distinctions
in medicine and genetics.
Already a prestigious presence
in the medical community,
University of Utah Health Care’s
future will be even brighter as
the campus and outreach efforts
expand in the rapidly changing
world of medicine.
In 2013, Governor Gary
Herbert signed a bill into law
which expanded the University of
Utah’s School of Medicine class
size from eighty-two students to
122 by the year 2015.
During the signing ceremony,
which took place in a classroom laboratory, Herbert told
the crowd that an important role of government is to
improve the lives of people, and that the bill would do that
by ensuring Utahns would have better access to healthcare
by increasing the number of providers. The University of
Utah is central to the role of giving people the care they
need, Herbert noted.
The University of Utah is also home to the Utah Genome
Project, an exciting large-scale initiative to advance the
development of better disease prevention, diagnosis and
treatment methods through discovery of new genetic signatures
for human disease and response to drug therapies,
using genome sequence analysis.
While genome sequence analysis is becoming routine in
biomedical research, the Utah Genome Project is different.
Unlike genome initiatives that study unrelated groups of
people, the Utah Genome Project will investigate genetic
signatures of disease and drug response in large families.
Only in Utah is a family-based approach of this scale possible,
thanks to the decades-long legacy of unrivaled support and
participation of many Utah families in research, and to the
Utah Population Database, one of the world’s richest sources
of in-depth information that supports genetic, epidemiology,
demography and public health research.
Another cutting-edge program at the University of Utah is
the Center for Medical Innovation, which serves as a place
for students and faculty from diverse areas to collaborate and
turn innovative ideas into actual medical products for the
market. Researchers work with students to help them
through the process of prototyping, verification testing and
commercialization phases where they can translate their
ideas to improvements in patient care.
S A L T L A K E C I T Y — L i v a b i l i t y i n t h e 2 1 s t C e n t u r y
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