Closing gap between lab reseachers, physicians
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has been selected as a recipient of the $2.5 million Physician-Scientist Institutional Award by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, an organization seeking to close the national gap between laboratory researchers and clinical physicians.
The award, which will be distributed over five years, will be used to fund the new Physician Scientist Incubator training program to support and prepare clinical physicians with M.D. degrees for laboratory research without requiring them to attain a Ph.D. The award was matched by a $2.5 million grant from UPMC and a $250,000 donation by Pitt.
Samer Tohme, a resident in the department of surgery at Pitt School of Medicine with a passion for both research and surgery, assisted with the application.
“I don’t only want to deliver care and operate,” Dr. Tohme said. “I want to be part of the discovery ... to find something in the lab and bring it to patient care.”
There have always been relatively few physicians interested in doing research, but the combination of a large
time commitment and lack of financial means has led to a high burnout rate among those who do choose to pursue it, he said. Physician-scientists are becoming an “endangered breed.”
Adding a second career of researchwould add to the already demanding schedule of a practicing physician; it could involve working six full days and spending extra time in the lab on days off, Dr. Tohme said. However, givingphysicians the ability to go back and forth between the lab and patients would be largely beneficial in terms of the efficiency of implementation of scientific discoveries.
“At the end it’s the physicians themselves seeing the patients so it should be the physicians doing the research,” Dr. Tohme said. He already participates in a similar program offered by the department of surgery but saidthat this grant will reach more departments and more people, making the possibility of becoming a psychologist-scientist or a surgeonscientistmore attainable.
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund, an independent bio-medical research foundation based in North Carolina, instituted the Physician-Scientist Institutional Award following a report published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The study showed that only 1.5 percent of clinical physicians perform research. Pitt’s Physician Scientist Incubator program was one of five similar programs in the United States chosen from 92 submissions to the fund.
Richard Steinman, associate professor of medicine and of pharmacology and chemical biology at Pitt’s School of Medicine, will serve as executive director of Pitt’s Physician Scientist Incubator program.
Programs like the Physician Scientist Incubator are vital due to the national shortage of physician-scientists, said Dr. Steinman, who also holds a doctorate. As both clinical and research needs increase, he said, there is lots of untapped potential in M.D.s for research.
“Physicians have a unique perspective that they can offer to scientific advancement to form a connection between relevant clinical issues and scientific discovery,” he said.
Pitt’s program will offer levels of support ranging from two to five years, Dr. Steinman said. It will provide technical and salary support for 21 people and an online curriculum that will touch on topics such as grant writing and overcoming specific obstacles in the field. It also will provide mentors for 100 more people. The program also focuses on interpersonal and time-management skills to assist physicians in balancing the added responsibilities of research.
Some participants will come from similar programs at Pitt School of Medicine that already mix elements of research and clinical work, but the program will also acceptinterested students from outsideof Pitt.
These types of programs are part of a growing trend to address the national shortage of physician-scientists, Dr. Steinman said. In addition to the four other selected programs at Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center-Dallas and Duke University Medical Center, the National Institutes of Health recently instituted a similar program to support research during residency training.
Dr. Steinman said he hopes the Physician Scientist Incubator program will lead to physicians running their own labs as well as seeing patients. He considers the skills taught in the program, such as writing and attaining grants, vital in helping clinical physicians be better able to identify the “glimmer of sun that they can inject into the darkness of disease.”