On Friday, April 18, Chancellor Phyllis Wise announced the possibility of developing an engineering-based medical college on the Urbana-Champaign campus — something we hope will come to fruition.

If created, the school would be developed by the University and Carle Health System, located in Urbana, and open in 2017. This would replace the UIC-affiliated College of Medicine on this campus, which currently offers a limited curriculum, including a first-year basic medical science program and the Medical Scholars Program.

The addition of this college would not rival the university’s main medical school located on the Chicago campus, but, instead, act as a supplement to it. And the concentration of each medical school would be different, which is why we believe the addition would be immensely beneficial.

Using the large amount of engineering and bioscience research already coming out of our campus, the medical school would be the first of its kind, with a primary focus on the combination of engineering, computing, health sciences and medicine.

In addition to making our campus more attractive to potential students interested in medicine and engineering, the addition of this college would allow us to pioneer advances in biomedical engineering and, in turn, revolutionize medicine and hopefully save the lives of more patients.

Engineers at the university, in a partnership with Northwestern, have already developed small, yet sophisticated, stick-on health monitors that stretch and move with human skin. Or consider the heart-cell-propelled sperm-like bio-bots created by a team at Illinois led by Professor Taher Saif that could be a basis for future means of performing minimally invasive surgeries or spotting disease.

With a new facility to house these sorts of projects, we can hopefully harbor more of these prominent technologies that hold vast potential for the future.

Although the development of this college would come at a cost — hundreds of millions of dollars — the benefits are obvious. That said, the project might not rely on state funding, should the University and Carle choose to pursue a private corporate structure, as recommended by Tripp Umbach, the consulting firm commissioned to report on the new college’s feasibility.

Instead, Tripp Umbach recommended that the venture rely on private donors for start-up costs and funding a $200 million endowment for the project. Given the state’s current financial situation, we agree that seeking out and raising capital from private sources would be optimal.

As a result, we feel that the benefits that come with this potential medical school outweigh monetary concerns held by the opposition. With so many inventions and ideas already coming out of the University, just imagine what could be done with additional resources and facilities fully committed to such endeavors.