Trudeau Institute

Campus of the Trudeau Institute from Lower Saranac Lake.

Saranac Laboratory, precursor to the Trudeau Institute. Presently the home of Historic Saranac Lake, a local nonprofit, historic preservation organization

The Trudeau Institute is an independent, not-for-profit, biomedical research center located in the Village of Saranac Lake, New York, whose scientific mission is to make breakthrough discoveries that lead to improved human health.

Led by immunologist Dr. David L. Woodland, who also heads his own laboratory, each research team, comprising a principal investigator, postdoctoral fellows and highly-trained technical staff, receives average annual grant support of just over $1 million, based largely upon success in earning highly-competitive federal grants, principally from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The Trudeau Institute also receives income through private philanthropy, licensing of its technologies and its endowment.

The Institute is governed by an uncompensated board of trustees comprising private individuals from across the United States; its leadership includes chairman Henry A. Fenn Jr. of Richmond, Mass., and vice-chairman Benjamin Brewster of Charlottesville, Virginia. The Institute presently employs 39 Ph.D.s from seven countries.

With an annual operating budget of more than $16 million in research grant support, Trudeau scientists work to discover the basic rules governing how the body’s natural defense system, immunity, attacks influenza, plague, tuberculosis, toxoplasmosis, and tumors of the lung, as well as how an overactive immune response, autoimmunity, results in asthma, arthritis and allergies. The Institute is also aggressively researching improved treatments for schistosomiasis, a disease which afflicts nearly one-third of the world's poorest people and one of the most important of the neglected tropical diseases, caused by infection with the parasitic helminthes worm.

The Institute is home to thirteen research teams, who study some aspect of infection and immunity, but across a variety of different pathogens. Their studies focus on immune responses to major infectious diseases, such as influenza and tuberculosis, as well as on the role of the immune system in cancer, sepsis and aging.

Using state-of-the-art experimental methodologies and mouse models, researchers on Trudeau's 25-acre campus utilize core facilities which include animal, flow cytometry, molecular, and imaging & microscopy cores, as well as BSL2 and BSL3 containment laboratories. Because all these groups use each facility extensively, and because the groups often collaborate in their research, the cores are used efficiently, and the many projects synergize nicely.

During the fall of 2009, an additional 10,000 square feet of laboratory and support space will be commissioned. This new space will provide state-of-the-art facilities for the Institute’s research in tuberculosis, pandemic influenza and other infectious diseases. The new wing is named in honor of former New York state senator Ronald B. Stafford.

History

The Institute was founded as the Saranac Laboratory for the Study of Tuberculosis by Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau in 1884 as a tuberculosis treatment and research facility.

Trudeau trained as a doctor after the death of his elder brother due to tuberculosis. He himself was diagnosed with the disease in 1873. Following conventional thinking of the times, his physicians and friends urged a change of climate. He went to live in the Adirondack Mountains, initially at Paul Smith's Hotel, spending as much time as possible in the open; he subsequently regained his health. In 1876 he moved to Saranac Lake and established a medical practice among the sportsmen, guides and lumber camps of the region.

In 1882, Trudeau read about Prussian Dr. Hermann Brehmer's success treating tuberculosis with the "rest cure" in cold, clear mountain air. Following this example, Trudeau founded the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium, with the support of several of the wealthy businessmen he had met at Paul Smiths. In 1894, after a fire destroyed his small laboratory, Trudeau organized the laboratory, which was the first in the United States dedicated to the study of tuberculosis.

As new drugs became available in the 1950s to treat the disease, the Institute was reestablished in 1964 as a research institute.

External links

• Official site
• Trudeau Institute, 1884-2008
• Historic Saranac Lake - the Saranac Laboratory