Howard Hughes Medical Institute

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is an American non-profit medical research organization headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with additional facilities in Ashburn, Virginia. It was founded in 1953 by the businessman Howard Hughes, who transferred the stock of Hughes Aircraft to it, and it became one of the largest private funders of biological and medical research in the United States after the 1985 sale of that company to General Motors. It supports researchers designated as HHMI Investigators and operates the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, completed in 2006 and modelled on Bell Labs and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Through its later decades it focused its mission on genetics, immunology and molecular biology, and in 2022 it began requiring immediate open access to the publications from its research.