Brief Description

The Foundation for Advancing Veteran’s Health Research (FAVHR), a non-profit corporation with the mission of supporting research collaborations to improve veterans’ health is located within the Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital Division at the South Texas Veterans Health Care System and directly adjacent to the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA), was created in 1988 to support the research mission of the VA health system. Currently, the FAVHR employs 28 research coordinators and technicians who support research activities conducted at the STVHCS.

The Audie L. Murphy Hospital, a division within the South Texas Veterans Health Care System, is a 268 bed facility providing primary, secondary, and tertiary health care in medicine, surgery, psychiatry, and rehabilitation medicine. It also supports a 90 bed Extended Care Therapy Center, a 30-bed Spinal Cord Injury Center, an eight-bed Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, and a Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center. The South Texas Veterans Health Care System (STVHCS) serves a population of approximately 300,000 veterans residing in the region stretching from San Antonio in Central Texas southward to the Mexican border.

The STVHCS system dedicates 28,000 square feet to medical research and is home to the GRECC (Geriatrics Research, Education, and Clinical Center), Claude Pepper Center, the Center for Personalized Medicine, and an Oncology Center of Excellence. Currently there are more than 150 research investigators conducting over 500 research activities in areas such as genetics, aging, renal disease, diabetes, Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF), HIV/AIDs, and cancer treatment and therapy.