One of New York’s most prestigious medical schools plans to raise $1.3 billion to build a new biomedical research center on the Upper East Side and to bring on more research scientists.

The five-year fund-raising drive at Weill Cornell Medical College is part of a hefty $4 billion capital campaign its parent school, Cornell University, is scheduled to launch this morning during a news conference with Mayor Bloomberg on hand. Cornell will also announce a $10 million state grant that will go largely toward coordinating the work scientists do on the school’s Ithaca and Manhattan campuses.

The medical school’s largest benefactor, Sanford Weill, a former CEO of Citigroup, said the $1.3 billion will be used to double the institution’s lab space, pay for more staff and equipment, and get the two campuses in sync to avoid duplicating scientific legwork.

“We think this may be the largest individual campaign by any medical school in the country,” Mr. Weill told The New York Sun.

Mr. Weill — a Wall Street titan who retired as CEO of Citigroup in 2003 and stepped down as its chairman earlier this year — said the school has already raised about 25% of its goal, or $325 million. That is not surprising, given that most institutions keep their campaigns under wraps until they have banked a sizable chunk of the money.

Mr. Weill, the namesake of the school, said he would play an active role in getting the donations. “I have much more time to spend now to bother people in my not-for-profit life,” he joked.

Cornell’s broader $4 billion campaign is the largest it has ever embarked on. It is on par with a slew of other ambitious philanthropic endeavors that other top universities have announced in the last year.

Columbia University announced a $4 billion fund-raising drive in May. Stanford University is in the midst of a $4.3 billion campaign. Yale University is looking to alumni and supporters for $3 billion.

That is not to mention what hospitals are raking in. New York hospitals have increasingly turned to philanthropy to offset the squeeze they are facing elsewhere. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, located just blocks from Weill Cornell, is in the middle of a $2 billion push, for example.

New York Presbyterian Hospital, the umbrella entity for Columbia and Cornell, is raising $1 billion. In fact, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center hosted a $2,000-a-plate gala fund-raiser last night, an annual event that is separate from both capital campaigns.

The fund-raising initiatives underscore the intense competition between academic institutions and medical colleges as they vie for federal dollars, faculty, and students.

They also highlight the stock the medical community is putting into biomedical research now that the Human Genome Project is complete and more medical breakthroughs are thought to be within reach.

The dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, Antonio Gotto, said about $600 million of the $1.3 billion will pay for a roughly 400,000-square-foot research facility on 69th Street and York Avenue, adjacent to the 15-story ambulatory care building the school is set to open in January.

“We are still a relatively small medical school, particularly in terms of research space, so this will enable us to put ourselves on par with what other major academic medical centers are able to do in research,” Dr. Gotto said.

The five-year timeline is ambitious by all accounts. It comes on the heels of two back-to-back campaigns that raised a combined $1.1 billion for the medical school in the last decade. That money paid for the new ambulatory center.

“It’s a lot of money. But we approach it with confidence,” Dr. Gotto said. “We wouldn’t have set this target if we didn’t think we could get it.”

The editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Stacy Palmer, said the $4 billion figure is “obviously one of the most ambitious campaigns in the country.”

“Certainly we see these goals getting higher and higher,” she said. “That’s a reflection of the fact that economic climate is very good for fund-raising now and everybody is doing extraordinarily well.”

The president and CEO of the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy, Bill McGinley, said that while philanthropy in medicine has long existed, it has increased dramatically, partly because health care institutions are getting “crunched” elsewhere.

“What I see happening all across the board is simply that there’s more focus and more emphasis on major gift giving than we’ve ever seen before in health care,” he said.

He also said the proliferation of new biomedical research centers — which are popping up all over the city — is not surprising and that those in the industry have every reason to support these fundraising campaigns.

Albert Einstein Medical College is scheduled to open a research center in 2008, New York University opened one in May, and Mount Sinai is planning one.

“When you look at biomedical, it is the future in so many ways. I would be willing to bet with some certainty that many of the major givers there are corporations and entities that support that industry,” Mr. McGinley said.

The president of Cornell University, Dr. David Skorton, a cardiologist who took over in July, said the $4 billion raised in the campaign will go toward more scholarships and financial aide, recruiting new faculty, and constructing new buildings to modernize the 114-year-old Ithaca campus.