Department Overview
This young 21st century promises a revolution, already manifest, in diagnostics and therapeutics. As one of two hospital-based departments in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania with a primary focus on clinical diagnostics, the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine will continually be called upon to help pave the way for Penn Medicine's full participation in this ongoing transformation.
Moreover, as the locus for infusional therapeutics, the Department also will be asked to embrace those next-generation therapeutics which involve the infusion of cells, proteins, and genes. These pivotal roles in patient care will be complemented by the Department's traditional, broad-based contributions to the education and research missions of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Penn Medicine’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine is organized into clinical divisions of Anatomic Pathology, Neuropathology, Laboratory Medicine, Transfusion Medicine and Therapeutic Pathology, Hematopathology, Precision and Computational Diagnostics, Pediatric Pathology, and its basic science division, Experimental Pathology and Immunobiology.
Each clinical division contains a number of specialty laboratories and services, while the experimental pathology division is comprised of a range of basic and translational research laboratories.
The department's physicians and scientists have developed many recent diagnostic tests through the use of cellular, genetic, and molecular technology. Research areas of interests include bioinformatics, biomarker discovery, cancer biology, cardiovascular pathobiology, developmental, stem cell, and regenerative biology, diabetes, experimental therapeutics, gene therapy and vaccines, genetics, gene regulation and genetic-related diseases, fundamental immunology, hematology, HIV, microbiology and infectious diseases, metabolic regulation, neuropathology and neurodegenerative disorders, proteomics, and orphan diseases.
Combining the full gamut of possible activities found within academic pathology departments, the Department has solidified its national reputation as one of the leading, fully integrated academic departments of its kind. It has also positioned itself at the crossroads of the intellectual life at Penn, as the home to many of the School of Medicine’s centralized resource laboratories and with substantive ties to multiple centers, institutes, departments and other schools on campus.
