Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) is a PhD-granting program that trains scientists in a specialty area with a broad background in the basic medical sciences in preparation for conducting research with direct relevance to human disease. According to the GSBS website, the school offers students a multidisciplinary program of study, in which they have freedom of choice in curriculum and in the selection of mentors for their graduate-thesis research. Since the first class of seven students enrolled in 1979, more than 1000 students have earned PhDs from the GSBS. Graduate School of Nursing Since the opening of the Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing (GSN) in 1986, more than 600 students have obtained a nursing master's, post-master's or doctoral degree from the school. The GSN prepares professional and advanced practice nurses, nurse scientists and educators as leaders in nursing and health-care delivery to diverse populations through education, research, practice and service (according to the GSN website). Research UMMS researchers have made advances in a broad range of disease families, from HIV and infectious diseases to cancer, genetic disorders, diabetes and immune disease. UMMS faculty discovered the link between the immune system and type-1 diabetes, found the genetic cause underlying the third-most-common form of the muscular dystrophies, and established the fundamental difference between HIV and other retroviruses. In the 1990s. UMMS Professor of Medicine Shan Lu, leader of the UMMS DNA-based flu vaccine efforts, worked to advance the development of a potential avian-flu vaccine. Lu's team has also been recognized for its work in the creation of an HIV vaccine, which in Phase I testing was found to generate antibody and T-cell responses in otherwise healthy people not infected with HIV. In 1998, UMMS researcher Craig Mello (an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute) and his colleague Andrew Fire (of Stanford University, then of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C.) discovered RNA interference (RNAi). They demonstrated that small pieces of double-stranded RNA had interfered with the expression of a gene whose coding sequence of DNA was similar to that of the RNA they tested. Mello and Fire received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries related to RNA interference. Federal and private research grants and contracts at UMMS rose from about $2 million in 1977 to more than $250 million in 2019. MassBiologics MassBiologics is the only publicly owned, non-profit FDA-licensed manufacturer of vaccine and other biologic products