The Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center (VAMC) in Charleston, SC offers primary, secondary, and tertiary care facility and operates 117 inpatient beds. The facility provides a full range of patient care services to veterans along the South Carolina and Georgia coast from North Myrtle Beach to the Savannah area, including acute medical, surgical, and psychiatric inpatient care as well as primary and specialized outpatient services and nursing home care. For the most recent fiscal year, the total number of inpatients treated was 4,203 and the total number of outpatient visits was 414,285. The Charleston VAMC is closely affiliated with MUSC. For FY2005-06, the VAMC supported 78.5 House Staff positions. Residents from MUSC rotate through all major clinical services, as do student trainees and trainees from nursing, pharmacy, social work, and other allied health positions. The Research Service at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center Center is broad-based with more than 184 active research protocols being conducted by 71 investigators. A unique partnership between the VAMC and MUSC maintains the nation’s only mutually supported research facility, housing collaborative biomedical research with an FY07 extramural funding level of about $20 million (approximately $5.4 million from the VA, $12 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and $2.9 million from other sponsors). VA investigators have wet bench laboratories totaling more than 46,000 ft2 in the Thurmond Biomedical Research Facility. Major research areas include hypertension, diabetes mellitus, heart failure, stem cell biology, cholesterol, cancer biology, renal diseases, signal transduction, mental health, substance abuse, and aging. The Ralph H. Johnson center has one of only six national VA Targeted Research Enhancement Programs (TREP); it focuses on racial disparities in health care. Outpatient clinical/translational research activities are housed in a dedicated 2,800 ft2 Clinical Research Unit (CRU) on the 2nd floor of the VAMC. The CRU has 10 examination rooms, a 4-station transfusion room, a 3-station physician workroom, a waiting room and a general laboratory with a –80ºF freezer, centrifuge, several refrigerators, and a microscope. The CRU also includes a sterile specimen storage facility, staff offices, and break- and workrooms.