6 minute read
ADVANCINg THE DEBAKEy LEgACy
Game-changing
Game-changing innovation
dr. Mauro Ferrari speaks with the enthusiasm of a head football coach sending in his team for the big game. As the new president, CEO and director of The Methodist Hospital Research Institute, his goal is to assemble the best team of researchers and clinicians to make the institute the leading facility of its kind in the world.
“We are focusing on innovative technologies and translating them into the clinic, taking advantage of the unbelievable privilege that we are working in such close proximity with world-renowned clinicians in many different specialties,” says Ferrari, who holds the Ernest Cockrell Jr. Distinguished Endowed Chair.
“Our ultimate objective is to change the history of medicine,” he says. The key to effect this change is putting together the best collaborative teams and giving them the freedom to devise the technological innovations to transform medicine.
Ferrari, 51, came to Methodist from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston where he was chairman of the Department of Nanomedicine and Biomedical Engineering. He joined Methodist last year, mindful of Dr. Michael DeBakey’s legacy.
The DeBakey legacy
“Dr. DeBakey is the example that we can point to in history of someone changing huge fields of medicine based on clinical primacy and the focus on new technologies,” Ferrari says. “Pretty much everything we have today in cardiothoracic surgery points back to something Dr. DeBakey invented or was the first to bring into the clinic, adopting it from the research laboratory. So technology and clinical primacy are the two key elements of what we are doing here.”
Ferrari wants to build on that legacy by creating an environment of innovation, attracting specialists who think outside the box to develop new ways to tackle the biggest problems in medicine today in key areas such as cancer, cardiovascular pathologies and neurodegenerative diseases.
“With cancer and coronary disease, the key challenges are identifying the tools to pinpoint the problem, detecting the problems as early as possible and personalizing the treatment.
“Clearly the two major problems in cancer are one, early detection and two, the treatment of metastatic disease. We are going to tackle these problems straight on,” Ferrari says. He points to the cancer stem cell team headed by Dr. Stephen Wong as the kind of work the Research Institute will advance.
“Wong is able to identify — out of existing drugs — what kind of uses and combinations you can come up with that have not been tapped yet. Sometimes we have the right drugs, but we use them for the wrong cancer. Some of the drug combinations are incredibly complex.
“So he does something that integrates very deep knowledge of pathways with some very sophisticated mathematical modeling so that you can pick,” Ferrari says. “The treatment of metastatic disease must be personalized. This is the type of challenge we are going to focus on.”
The same is true for coronary disease, but Ferrari says neurodegenerative diseases are a different story. “The work on neurodegenerative diseases will involve studying biological fluids extracted from the blood stream or exhaled air to help establish the probability of the patient developing the disease. It also will be used to tailor the treatment to the specific findings.
“It is largely a technology proposition, so we are going to be the world-leading place that develops the technologies and validates them across different disease processes,” Ferrari says. “Experts in different diseases are going to learn from each other’s experiences: the cancer people are going to learn with the diabetes people, and the orthopedic people are going to learn with the plastic surgeons, and so on. This is the
advantage of focusing on cross-cutting technological innovation and biological processes that are common for different medical conditions.”
Conquering the unattainable
Ferrari is a big proponent of collaboration. At other institutions where he worked, including Ohio State University, University of California-Berkeley, National Cancer Institute and UT, he assembled teams of researchers from several institutions to work on projects.
“I have been working across institutional boundaries my whole life,” Ferrari says. “Working together, we have achieved things that we could not have done on our own; so there is an added advantage to each institution to work together. It is not a zero-sum game. We do more things; we get more resources, we can conquer otherwise unattainable objectives.”
Ferrari has been offered leadership positions at other institutions, but always turned them down — until now.
“There is nothing like this (institute) in the country, I would say in the world, at this time,” he says. “It is a unique proposition. … an opportunity to build from the early goings, working in close connection with the best hospital in the country — perhaps in the world — with this vision, focusing on clinical translation and the DeBakey legacy. That’s perfect.” And Ferrari has a new, 12-story facility to call his home. The 440,000-square-foot Research Institute building adjacent to The Methodist Hospital houses six floors of laboratories and space for clinical trials. Ferrari’s entire program in nanomedicine has relocated to the building with 100 researchers working on current projects in cancer therapy, tissue regeneration and early detection of diseases. Ferrari will continue to lead research in his laboratory.
He says communication is important and has been lacking between clinicians and researchers at other institutions. “The hardest part is to get together the technology world, the science world and the clinical world. There are tremendous untapped resources, but I would estimate 99 percent of the research ideas that could yield clinical advances end up not making it because of communication problems and the various ‘death valleys’ of clinical translation,” Ferrari says.
“Our great strength at this research institution is that the focus on explosive technology is deeply ingrained in the clinic. Our focus is and will always be the translation of game-changing innovation into the clinic. That is the nature and the mission of our institute.
“We want to be the No. 1 place in the world when it comes to translating medical innovation and bringing it into the clinic. When people think of new, enabling medicine, we want them to think of Methodist,” Ferrari says. n
Aker/Zvonkovic Photography
MIssIOn:
n To reduce the burdens of disease and suffering by conducting groundbreaking research that will lead to new treatments for disease and new approaches to prevention BuIldInG:
n 440,000 total square feet n 12 stories n 150 lab benches n 6 laboratory floors peOple:
n 90+ principal investigators n 1,000+ credentialed researchers
capaBIlITIes:
n Nine departments including infectious disease, radiology, bioinformatics, bioengineering, transplant biology, nanomedicine, cancer, cancer pathology, radiation oncology n Centers for computational biology and bioinformatics n State-of-the-art imaging including commercial-grade
SPECT, wide-bore MRI and PET n 2 biosafety labs n Good manufacturing practices facility to produce pharmaceutical samples and nanoparticles for testing and research n Methodist Institute for Technology, Innovation &
Education (MITIESM), a surgical training and virtual hospital facility with 15 procedural skills stations, one cardiothoracic operating room and three research ORs n 700 ongoing clinical trials
