Research at WMed

Dean Termuhlen's Take Header


In this month’s installment of Dean Termuhlen’s Take On …, our dean Dr. Paula Termuhlen discusses the importance of research at WMed, the medical school’s new research strategic plan, and how discovery and innovation help improve the communities we serve.

Dean Termuhlen's Take PhotoWhat role and importance does research play in helping WMed and the medical school community achieve our mission, vision, values, and strategic priorities?

One of the most important things that medical schools do is help to forward science and the field of science has lots of different components. It’s everything from understanding what community problems might be present, interventions that might help solve them, to understanding the biology behind human disease. So, medical schools are uniquely positioned with highly skilled individuals who can help to both understand the human condition and the communities we serve, and to develop the treatments and interventions that can improve the lives of everyone.

Plans for a strategic plan around research are currently underway at the medical school. What will that process look like as the strategic plan comes together and how will that new strategic plan strengthen WMed as a hub of discovery and innovation?

We just launched this initiative in January with assistance from ECG Consultants, a company that has worked with several medical schools and hospitals across the United States. This decade in the life of WMed is the time for us to put together a comprehensive research plan that aligns with our new mission, vision, and priorities. It will have components of laboratory science, clinical research, biomedical informatics, and community-based participatory research. Together, these will help us efficiently and effectively use our resources in service to forwarding the science of these different domains through a process that is part of our maturation as a medical school. We spent almost a year putting together our larger institutional strategic plan and embedded within that are the four missions of a medical school – education, clinical care, community engagement, and research. Each one of these areas requires a deeper dive so this strategic plan for research will take us about six months using a similar process of interviewing stakeholders, identifying our current resources, understanding the gaps we have, and putting together a plan to identify the additional people and programs we are positioned to successfully support and promote. Research is one way that we help to grow our reputation and we are deeply committed to our community. So, developing a research program that helps us build that unique reputation will really serve us well for the next decade.

What do you see as the medical school’s strengths within the research realm? Conversely, where do you think there’s room for improvement?

We have been remarkably successful in our laboratory science and in the growth and development of our biomedical informatics programs. We measure success by the growth and development of those programs, by the growth of resources such as federal grants that they’re able to obtain, and how the individuals who participate in those programs regionally, nationally, and internationally discuss their work. The opportunities for us to expand our research mission include redesigning our clinical research center and growing our community-based participatory research work. In terms of our strengths, our Department of Investigative Medicine is an internationally recognized area of excellence and the work they do in understanding human immunology is helping us learn more about the differences in how elderly people respond to pneumonia and understand more about neurologic disease. At WMed, we also have expertise in understanding the health problems that impact our community. One area where we’ve been very active is with Cradle Kalamazoo working to understand more about infant mortality and developing interventions to help reduce the rate of infant mortality in Kalamazoo. The work with Cradle Kalamazoo, in particular, represents an area where WMed can expand its research footprint because we are uniquely positioned to be partners with our community in a wide variety of ways. As we utilize tools like the community health needs assessment, which our hospitals conduct, it tells us what the biggest health problems in our community are. Then we can come together and develop the laboratory science, community-based research, and the electronic health record database that will allow us to understand the entire continuum. With this, we can develop interventions that will improve the health of our community.

How does Kalamazoo’s rich history of life science exploration, drug discovery, and medical device development help position WMed for success in research?

First and foremost, we are part of a community that understands, respects, and wants the type of innovative research that continues to help people across the world. In addition, we have an opportunity to develop more partnerships with the industries that have come about based on the science that has gone on in Kalamazoo for many years. A key component of our research infrastructure is the Innovation Center. The Innovation Center allows us to play a role providing a location and resources for life science companies to launch and contribute to forwarding and improving the health of communities across the country. We have the investigators that are developing the scientific ideas and interventions that will improve health and, at the same time, we are providing a supportive environment for the kind of work that will lead to the successful launch of companies. Another area we support in that regard is the work of our hospitals and the clinical research they do, especially in the areas of cancer, trauma care, and stroke patients. These types of programs require that they have experience with research in those areas and our Center for Clinical Research at WMed helps to support that.

The Association of American Medical Colleges launched a campaign in November to help federal policymakers and influencers better understand, appreciate and support the value its institutions provide. One of the tenets of the AAMC campaign is that academic medicine helps save lives through driving breakthroughs. How is research at WMed helping contribute to academic medicine in that way?

Within the Department of Investigative Medicine and the Center for Immunobiology, Nichol Holodick, PhD, looks at B-cell immunology related to pneumonia in elderly patients. Meanwhile, Thomas L. Rothstein, MD, PhD, our chair of the Department of Investigative Medicine who leads the Center for Immunobiology, has a new grant that is supporting his research looking at neurodegenerative diseases. Additionally, Catherine Kothari, PhD, from the Department of Biomedical Sciences, has worked tirelessly with Cradle Kalamazoo on research and interventions to combat infant mortality that are nationally recognized. Adil Akkouch, PhD, and Yong Li, MD, PhD, are working on regenerative medicine projects that will help us understand more about wound healing. These examples of research and innovation at WMed contribute to the mission that the AAMC is trying to promote through the Academic Medicine: What Happens Here Saves Lives campaign. The goal of the campaign is to share the story with the public of the importance of medical schools that goes beyond training physicians. The pandemic is an example of how medical schools helped us get so far so fast in terms of developing vaccinations and different ways of protecting the public at-large. So, as people start to understand that relationship, we hope that will continue the support that medical schools need through federal grants and other funding. It’s important that people understand how those resources get used and link those resources with the development of treatments and cures for a wide variety of human disease that will help us improve the health of our population.

A Hat Tip from Dr. T

I want to give special thanks to our Facilities and Information Technology teams at WMed. Our team members in facilities continually make sure that we have comfortable spaces to work in, that we can get in and out of our buildings safely, and they’ve been part of the effort to enhance our safety with the recent rollout of the new Rave Panic Button app. They, along with IT, do great work providing services at our multiple locations in Kalamazoo, Portage, and Battle Creek, and outside of WMed, our IT professionals ensure we have the infrastructure needed to work effectively in a hybrid fashion.

Dean Termuhlen’s Take On ... is a monthly message from our dean to discuss topics of importance to WMed, medical school stakeholders, and the communities that make up Southwest Michigan. Is there a topic you would like to hear Dean Termuhlen’s take on? Let us know by sending a message to office.dean@wmed.edu.