A Successful Fundraising Year for Johns Hopkins Medicine

The Fund raises more than $370 million to help support research, education and patient care.

By Linell Smith on 10/02/2015

Published in Dome - October 2015

Johns Hopkins Medicine board of trustees member Louis Thalheimer recently pledged $5 million to launch a translational pre-seed grant program for Johns Hopkins scholar-inventors. “It will provide an injection of much-needed capital to projects that have well-defined commercialization milestones,” says Christy Wyskiel of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures. “It’s a critical addition to the budding Johns Hopkins investment ecosystem.”

The new program is one example from a successful year of fundraising for Johns Hopkins Medicine. In fiscal year 2015, The Fund for Johns Hopkins Medicine raised more than $370 million to help support its tripartite mission of research, education and patient care.

As part of The Johns Hopkins University’s Rising to the Challenge $4.5 billion campaign, the fund has pledged to raise $2.4 billion—slightly more than half. So far, it has raised roughly $1.7 billion. It seeks an additional $750 million over the next two years of the campaign, according to Steve Rum, Johns Hopkins Medicine’s vice president for development and alumni affairs.

The goal for fiscal year 2016 is $375 million—more than $1 million a day. Averaging more than $300 million per year in gifts, Johns Hopkins Medicine is among the world’s leaders in hospital and medical philanthropy.

Members of The Fund for Johns Hopkins Medicine team proudly display the amount of money raised in FY15.

Fast Facts About Fiscal Year 2015 Philanthropy

The Department of Neurosurgery raised $50 million.

The Department of Medicine raised a record $44 million.

The Johns Hopkins Children’s Center had its best year ever. It raised $18.7 million, surpassing its goal by 144 percent.

The single best month in the history of the fund was June 2015. It raised a total of $119 million.

More than $30 million was raised by four of Johns Hopkins Medicine’s member hospitals: All Children’s, Howard County General, Suburban and Sibley Memorial.

There were 41,000 unique donors.

Sixty donors gave more than $1 million. Eight of the donors gave more than $5 million.

Sixty-one gift officers from the fund visited 5,900 potential benefactors.

Source: The Fund for Johns Hopkins Medicine

The Importance of Early Support

The Louis B. Thalheimer Fund for Translational Research was established to provide critical funding for projects with a clear commercialization pathway. For example, investigators at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine recently identified a therapeutic compound that can reinvigorate the internal system that appears to control the speed at which chronic wounds can heal. The discovery of this novel topical agent, which builds on earlier unique findings, may significantly accelerate healing, according to Christy Wyskiel of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures.

She says that the researchers had all the right scientific ingredients for success but needed help putting together a plan to translate the technology to market and garner additional funding. Although their project received funding from the Maryland Technology Development Corporation, such ventures often lack the money to take the product to the next stage of validation work. Thalheimer Fund awards will now help support that important step.

—LS

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