In July, Johns Hopkins leaders announced plans for a new Life Sciences Building to be constructed at the southwest corner of Broadway and East Monument Street, which
will serve as an anchor for a “Life Sciences Corridor” stretching from Bond Street to North Washington Street
in East Baltimore.

The new building is the linchpin in an ambitious effort aimed at transforming Johns Hopkins’ basic science presence and capabilities on the East Baltimore medical campus, noted Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels and Theodore L. DeWeese, interim dean of the medical faculty and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, in a letter to the Johns Hopkins community.

As part of the modernization effort, a new Health Sciences Building, under construction in space on East Monument Street that formerly housed the Children’s Medical and Surgical Center, is scheduled to open its first wing next year and “is designed to meet the most pressing needs of faculty engaged in not only basic but also translational research,” Daniels and DeWeese noted.

In addition, three of the buildings that currently house school of medicine basic science departments — the Hunterian Building, the Wood Basic Science Building and the Preclinical Teaching Building — will undergo extensive renovation and modernization in the coming years and several older buildings are likely to be removed.

DeWeese and Daniels said that the new Life Sciences Building will promote interdisciplinary collaboration across the entire university, bringing together expertise from the school of medicine, as well as from the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, the Whiting School of Engineering, the school of nursing and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Scientists and technologists will work side by side in “scientific neighborhoods” designed “to spark creativity and fuel discovery,” they said, adding, “The Life Sciences Corridor will also support one of the goals in the university’s new strategic plan: to retain, recruit and inspire the very best faculty in the world by ensuring that Johns Hopkins has competitive resources, state-of-the-art facilities and outstanding support services that nurture research and discovery at the vanguard of each field of inquiry.”