Baystate Medical Center and the University of Massachusetts Amherst are PVLSI’s founding partners. They established PVLSI to build on the success of the UMass Amherst – Baystate Medical Center Collaborative Biomedical Research Program (CBR).

Baystate Medical Center located in Springfield, MA is the flagship hospital of Baystate Health, the third largest not-for-profit healthcare system in New England. Baystate Medical Center has 653 beds and more than 4,000 employees, serving a diverse, stable patient population and consistently ranks among the top 100 hospitals in the country. This widely recognized major teaching hospital and research facility serves western Massachusetts and is the Western Campus of Tufts University School of Medicine and their largest teaching site. BMC is the region's only tertiary care referral hospital and Level I Trauma Center, with the only neonatal and pediatric intensive care units, adult cardiac surgery program, and kidney and bone marrow transplantation programs. Early in 2004, Baystate opened The D'Amour Center for Cancer Care, the region's only freestanding multi-disciplinary cancer treatment facility.

Baystate Medical Center's 250 Tufts faculty include all specialties of medicine and Baystate has approximately 300 graduate medical trainees in 9 residency and 14 fellowship ACGME-accredited programs. Approximately 400 nurses as well as 400 allied health students across 30 different programs also receive some or all of the clinical training at BMC. Clinical and translational research is growing at Baystate with funded research from National Institutes of Health and other national funding agencies and approximately 250 actively enrolling clinical trials with over $10 million annually in funded research and contracts.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is the flagship campus of the Commonwealth’s University system. UMass Amherst is a major research university enrolling approximately 25,000 students, from all 50 United States and over 100 countries. Its 10 schools and colleges offer 87 undergraduate majors, 73 master’s and 51 doctoral programs. UMass Amherst received $116 million in research awards in 2006. Located on 1,450-acres in the scenic Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, the campus provides a rich cultural environment in a rural setting close to major urban centers. As a member of the Five College consortium, the university shares a mutually rewarding relationship with students from Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith colleges.

The campus is ranked first among New England public research institutions in the number of faculty members in the National Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineers, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It ranks among the nation's top 40 public institutions in the number and prestige of faculty awards. As a Carnegie research-intensive institution, UMass Amherst is highly regarded in such areas as polymer science, artificial intelligence, and microwave engineering as well as the life sciences. The Molecular and Cellular Biology program was recently ranked in the top 30% by the National Research Council's study of graduate programs. Plans are under way to build a state of the art integrative science building within the next five years.

Additional Partners

• Massachusetts Technology Collaborative
• Regional Technology Corporation
• University of Massachusetts System
• Biomedical Research Models, Inc.