More than a medical school

By Michelle Crouch

Co-published with The Charlotte Ledger

For years, Charlotte has been the largest US city without a four-year medical school. By next summer, if all goes according to plan, that is finally set to change.

The Charlotte campus of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine is scheduled to open in 2025, with its first class of 48 students arriving in August. Enrollment is expected to increase to 100 students per class over the next five years.

The campus will eventually allow the Wake Forest University School of Medicine to graduate about 245 doctors a year across its campuses in Winston-Salem and Charlotte, with a goal of helping to ease the state’s shortage of health care providers.

But the Charlotte med school campus is just one piece of a larger transformation underway on the 20-acre site known as The Pearl in the Midtown/Dilworth area of ​​Charlotte, just outside of uptown.

The Pearl aims to be a bustling medical innovation district — “a Silicon Valley for health care” — to attract not just students, but also researchers, tech startups and biomedical companies.

Atrium Health and Wexford Science & Technology are driving the $1.5 billion development. The first phase includes two buildings: a 10-story research building (the Research 1 Building) and a 14-story education center (The Howard R. Levine Center for Education).

In addition to the med school, the education building will house Wake Forest’s School of Business programs, its new School for Professional Studies and the Carolinas College of Health Science, which trains nurses and other health care professionals.

The two buildings are connected on the second floor by a raised bridge, adding a physical link between education and research.

Future phases of the project call for more research buildings, a hotel, multifamily housing and street-level retail.

The Ledger/NC Health News recently toured the construction site with Atrium and Wexford representatives and chatted by phone with the dean of the Wake Forest University Medical School.

Here are some of the big and small things to know about The Pearl innovation district and the new medical school:

Six facts about The Pearl

1. Positioning North Carolina as a life sciences hub

When Charlotte Assistant City Manager Tracy Dodson talks to people about The Pearl, she said they often assume that she’s talking about the medical school. She’s quick to tell them that “it’s so much more than that.”

She said when she first heard about the project five years ago, she, too, didn’t fully grasp its potential impact.

“How quickly they have transformed this space and how much more really is to come… it’s the most transformative thing we’ve seen here in decades,” said Dodson, who oversees economic development for the city.

She said The Pearl — along with a similar Wexford innovation district in Winston-Salem and the Research Triangle Park in Raleigh — are paving the way for North Carolina to become a leading life sciences hub.

2. Space is filling fast, more floors added

Strong demand prompted the developers to expand the research and education buildings’ plans by two floors each, said Collin Lane, enterprise senior vice president of facilities management for Atrium parent Advocate Health.

The research building, slated to open in June, is already 70 percent to 85 percent leased, he said.

The anchor tenant is IRCAD, a French surgical-training institute that is setting up its North American headquarters on four floors.

The institute is expected to draw thousands of surgeons to Charlotte each year to learn new surgical techniques, test and refine surgical devices or develop new ones.

Several other tenants have committed and will be announced in the coming months, Dodson said.

Lane described IRCAD as a “super-magnet” attracting businesses, physicians and innovators. He said it will help position Charlotte as an “epicenter for the medical device industry.”

3. A “surgical ballroom” for hands-on training

Instead of a traditional “operating theater,” where students learn a new technique while watching a single surgery from above, surgeons at IRCAD will train in a so-called “surgical ballroom.”

It’s a large open space with 26 training stations (and the ability to accommodate up to 45). Each station is a fully equipped operating room with surgical tools, imaging and patient simulations, so physicians can practice different advanced surgical techniques simultaneously.

4. Plug-and-play space for health care startups

A 35,000-square-foot space in the research building is dedicated to Connect Labs, offering prebuilt lab and office space for small biotech companies that need access to specialized equipment without the steep cost of building out their own facilities.

It’s part of the plan to create a collaborative environment where startups can innovate alongside established researchers, students and experienced, helping to accelerate discoveries, Lane said.

5. A tribute to the Brooklyn neighborhood

The Pearl is taking shape in the former Brooklyn neighborhood, which was home to Charlotte’s largest Black community before urban renewal destroyed it in the 1960s.

A walking trail will connect The Pearl to Pearl Street Park, the first African American park in Charlotte, and serve as a walking history museum. It will include three pieces of art from the local minority art community and signs with QR codes sharing Brooklyn’s history, Lane said.

Near the entry to both buildings, an outdoor plaza called “Jacob’s Ladder” will provide space for community gatherings or small events. The plaza’s name and design honors a public school in Brooklyn that served Black children and symbolizes The Pearl’s commitment to upward mobility, Lane said.

6. STEM lab for younger students

The Pearl includes a STEM lab to get younger students excited about careers in science, technology designed, education and medicine.

Atrium Health is working with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and other educational partners to create the program and build a hands-on curriculum, Lane said. It will provide free, year-round learning opportunities for middle school students, with plans to eventually expand to high school students.

Students and teachers will have the opportunity to rotate into the lab for field trips, workshops and special programs.

Six facts about the new medical school

7. Med school applications at record level

Applications to the Wake Forest University School of Medicine have already surpassed last year’s record of 12,100, and they are still coming in, said Dr. Roy Strowd, the school’s vice dean for undergraduate medical education.

“That puts Wake in the top five to 10 schools in terms of the most interest,” he said.

It’s hard to know how much of the boost is due to the new campus, but Strowd said, “I think there’s buzz. The word is out about the campus and about the school and the growth.”

Students applied to the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and not a specific campus, but they will be able to indicate their preferred campus during a later phase of the process, Strowd said.

8. Anatomy without cadavers

Students at the new medical school won’t work with cadavers, Strowd said. Instead, they will explore human anatomy and how the disease affects the body using a virtual tool that’s like a giant iPad, Strowd said.

Students will be able to rotate body parts, zoom in and peel back layers of the human body to study different systems and structures. And their anatomy training will be integrated across the curriculum rather than in a standalone class.

They will also use plastinated specimens — real human body parts preserved with plastic resins (like those in the Body Worlds exhibit). Cadavers will still be used at the school’s Winston-Salem campus.

9. A problem-based approach to learning

Unlike traditional medical schools, which typically begin with a focus on the body’s systems and their functions, students on Wake’s Charlotte campus will start each week with a specific patient case, Strowd said. Students will then learn about the body as they work through the case, he explained.

For example, if the case involves heart failure, a patient may present with shortness of breath and leg swelling, and students will have to diagnose the condition while gaining an understanding of how the heart functions.

The Winston-Salem campus will continue with the traditional approach, he said, giving Wake the ability to meet the needs of different types of learners.

“We want to be a medical school for all learners,” he said. “Having these two campuses, and having these two different approaches, allows us to tailor to that broader group. Students still learn the same stuff, they take the same tests, and they achieve the same goals, but they get there in a slightly different way.”

10. Practicing physicians to do much of the teaching

The Charlotte campus has a core group of about eight dedicated medical educators who developed the curriculum and will teach, Strowd said.

In addition, Wake is in the process of hiring 30 to 40 practicing physicians from the Charlotte area to teach on the new campus. These doctors will start their training in spring 2025.

During their final two years, students will work with as many as 1,000 Charlotte-area physicians during rotations and clinical work. (Note: students from the Winston-Salem campus are already doing this in Charlotte).

“These doctors who are seeing patients in Charlotte are also being the mentors and instructors for those students,” Strowd said. “This is how we as a school embed students in the community, right? The students are able to then develop connections with those physicians and their patients.”

11. Future docs to connect with community

New students at Wake Forest University School of Medicine-Charlotte will learn about ways to volunteer in the city during a half-day community engagement fair early in their first semester and will be expected to engage, Strowd said.

In addition, up to half of the school’s students are expected to join the school’s Service Learning Scholars program, a certificate track in which students typically complete 120 to 160 hours of service over four years.

That community work not only enriches their learning but strengthens their ties to the region, Strowd said, increasing the likelihood they will remain in North Carolina for residency and potentially long-term practice.

12. Mock operating rooms, labor and delivery units

The education building includes more than 30 classrooms and lab spaces, designed to accommodate between 12 and 250 students, to be shared among the different programs.

A lot of the learning will happen in high-tech simulation rooms that mimic real-world medical environments, Lane said. These include mock operating rooms, labor and delivery units, trauma rooms and outpatient clinics.

There’s even a mock apartment where students can train to administer in-home care.

This article is part of a partnership between The Charlotte Ledger and North Carolina Health News to produce original health care focused reporting on the Charlotte area. Want more information? Read more here.

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