Dahms Clinical Research Unit

Half a Century of Discovery

A Proving Ground for Patients Reaches a Milestone

For half a century, the W.T. Dahms Clinical Research Unit at University Hospitals Case Medical Center has been raising standards of patient care worldwide by supporting innovation-driving clinical trials.

Today, the longtime fixture at UH’s main campus is extending its clinical-research reach into community facilities, to provide more patients with opportunities to participate in, and benefit from, leading-edge science.

Physician-scientists conducting clinical trials at the Dahms unit have spurred advances in pediatrics, psychiatry, infectious diseases and cancer. Medicines developed there extend life for cystic-fibrosis patients and allow schizophrenia patients to live lives approaching normal, without debilitating side effects.

“Treatments we couldn’t envision just a short time ago have become reality because of work that this unit enabled,” says Fred C. Rothstein, MD, President of UH Case Medical Center.

The Dahms unit celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2012. It is a joint effort with the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. Work there is funded primarily through the National Institutes of Health’s $64 million Clinical Translational Science Award grant to the School of Medicine.

In 2012, the Dahms unit began establishing satellite research facilities, starting at UH Bedford Medical Center, a campus of UH Regional Hospitals; and at the UH Otis Moss Jr. Health Center in Cleveland.

“As great as the unit’s impact has been over the last 50 years, it stands to be even greater over the next 50,” contends Philip Cola, Vice President for Research & Technology at UH Case Medical Center. “We’re changing the face of medicine by bringing clinical research out of academia and into the community.”