In four years, FAU medical students will be able to study the effects of macular degeneration in a real human eye. Instead of reading textbooks about cancer and cardiovascular disease, they’ll be able to help treat people with the diseases. They can even conduct clinical trials on new medications.

And they’ll be able to do all this without ever leaving FAU’s Boca campus.

FAU’s new $650 million teaching hospital, slated for completion in 2011, will allow students in FAU’s fledgling medical program access to a large patient base and cutting-edge facilities to conduct many kinds of research.

“The hospital will expand what they can do,” says Dr. Michael Friedland, vice president of medical programs at FAU. “This will make FAU a major player in healthcare.”

With 530 beds, about twice as many as the current hospital, students will have more interaction with patients – on the inpatient and outpatient side, Friedland says. They’ll also gain more clinical experience.

FAU’s researchers will no longer have to send off their treatments to be tested at other schools. They’ll be able to do clinical trials right on the Boca campus. They’ll do toxicity studies on drugs already proven to be effective and dose studies.

According to Friedland, the facility will also house areas specializing in things like cardiovascular disease, cancer, stroke and neurological diseases. Sitting on 38 acres of land on the southeast corner of campus, the hospital will be twice the size of the current one, with 1.1 million square feet of space.

Now that the state approved the plans to relocate the Boca Raton Community Hospital to FAU’s Boca campus last December, all that’s left to do is build the structure. They’re expected to break ground in 2008.

The New teaching hospital “will be a great opportunity for lots of different research,” FAU President Frank Brogan says. He adds that it will make FAU scientists more competitive for government and foundation funding.

And Friedland believes that FAU’s new hospital will give the university the boost it needs to become a research university.

“It’s a really exciting venture that will change FAU dramatically.”