Queen’s Mission is to fulfill the intent of its founders Queen Emma and King Kamehameha IV to provide in perpetuity quality health care services to improve the well-being of Native Hawaiians and all of the people of Hawaii. Queen’s envisions this by being the preeminent health care system of the Pacific, providing superior patient care that is continually advanced through education and research.

Biomedical research is a critical component of patient care excellence. At Queen’s, this is accomplished through groundbreaking findings at the molecular level, through research translating these findings into clinical trials, and through incorporation of evidence-based practice across the medical center.

Since its establishment in 1998, the Queen’s Center for Biomedical Research under the directorship of Reinhold Penner, MD PhD, has made seminal contributions to our understanding on how disease can occur at a molecular and cellular level. QCBR has identified several novel and fundamental proteins, and with this unraveled new cellular signaling mechanisms that, if not controlled carefully by the human body, can lead to diseases such as diabetes, autoimmune disease and cancer.