Global Infectious Disease Program Epitomizes Ensemble Science
Coaches call it team playing; investment managers, pooling resources.
Ensemble science is what Georgetown University Medical Center’s Howard J. Federoff, MD, calls it.
Ensemble science is the now and future approach to dynamic, discovery- oriented laboratory science, built of networks of collegial collaboration among separate scientific disciplines. It is a good, old-fashioned, more-heads-are-better approach that is thriving around all the best laboratory benches. It has replaced the outdated stereotype of the lone, white-coated scientist-hero toiling solo in the lab late into the night on secret experiments.
It is an approach that Federoff, executive vice president for health sciences, uses successfully in his own multi-targeted neurological research. It also is a driver of his strategic vision that includes, among other objectives, “a high-performance, interdisciplinary research environment...using a modern ensemble or team research approach,” Federoff said in a recent town meeting.
And ensemble science is in full swing at Georgetown University, epitomized by the Global Infectious Disease (GID) program. This long-standing, hearty, and campus-wide collaboration of scientists most recently launched a small but robust five-year PhD program that doubled its number of students from the first to second year.
From as far away as China, GID doctoral students receive access to multi-disciplinary faculty and other resources potentially spanning all of Georgetown’s campuses and schools from the main campus to the Law Center to the business school to the Medical Center.
The ensemble reflects a creative collaboration among the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, basic sciences and GUMC. Launched in April, 2008, the five-year PhD program now totals eight students.
In yet another nod to collaboration, the program is funded equally by main campus and GUMC.
“Biology, biochemistry, infectious disease – there’s no one department that can claim all of that,” said Richard Calderone, PhD, professor and chair of the department of microbiology and immunology and co-director of the GID PhD program. “How do you unite that? Interdisciplinary is the key word. That’s what we have done.”
Program co-directors, Steven M. Singer, PhD, and director of graduate studies in the biology department, and Paul Roepe, PhD, professor and chair of the department of chemistry, both are main campus faculty members. Their collaboration, and that of other faculty from all schools and centers and disciplines, is what makes the program work.
More than two dozen primary dissertation mentors are available to GID students, from an array of disciplines ranging from biology and chemistry to pediatrics and pathology.
Interdisciplinary collaboration pays off. In 2006, 16 Georgetown researchers studying global infectious disease earned nearly $14 million in research grants; in 2007 15 earned $11.5 million, and; in 2008, 16 scientists earned more that $13 million in research grants.
And, 2009 may prove a record grant earning year for infectious disease researchers at Georgetown. In the first half of the year, grants to 11 researchers totaled more than $6.5 million. That's thanks, in part, to President Obama's economic stimulus package, but also to the program's growing reputation for great ensemble science.
Calderone and his team of researchers have focused their efforts towards drug discovery in the treatment of candidiasis, a common human infection that occurs as an invasive, blood-borne and life-threatening disease or as mucosal vaginitis and oral infections such as thrush, common in HIV/AIDS patients. Candida invasive, blood-borne infections cost the US healthcare system about $1.8 billion each year, according to Calderone.
About two million people a year die of malaria worldwide, many of them because malaria parasites have become resistant to existing drug therapies. Roepe’s lab is shedding light on the molecular details of drug resistant malarial parasites, likely linked to a variety of proteins involved in transmembrane ion transport.
Singer focuses his research on the water-borne, protozoan parasite Giardia, which replicates in mammal intestines and is a major cause of human diarrheal disease. In the U.S., it is mainly found among campers and hikers who fail to treat the water they drink. It can also spread in day care centers and nursing homes. But for thousands of children, the sick and elderly already weakened by HIV/AIDS, poor nutrition or other diseases, Giardia can be life-threatening.
Infectious diseases and their spread highlight the need for education on how simple precautions like cleanliness immediately can help stem suffering in the global south. “Clean water is going to be the fastest cure and the cheapest in the world,” for Giardia, cholera and other water-borne diseases, Singer says.
Drug discovery, orphan diseases, and technology to track infectious disease outbreaks are some program topics that draw on expertise from GUMC, including the School of Nursing & Health Studies, Georgetown College, ISIS (Imaging Science and Information Systems), and the O’Neill Institute of the Law Center.
Infectious disease is brutal, hitting hardest the world’s poorest, most unhealthy people. That irony, says Federoff, bestows opportunities for intervention particularly suited to Georgetown’s duet of moral imperatives, cura personalis, or care of the whole person, and service to others, or sending freshly educated men and women out into places in the world where help is most urgently needed.
“Rigorous basic science informs the policy, information comes back and drives refinement,” says Federoff. “Chances for containment (of the spread of infectious disease) are greatest when science can identify, measure, contain, treat and vaccinate. That is our call to action.”
By Victoria Churchville, GUMC Science Writer
