One Saturday during his Johns Hopkins Osler internal medicine training, Franco D’Alessio met Landon King, the pulmonary and critical care physician on call. The second-year resident asked King if he had any suggestions about how to spend his upcoming elective rotations.
D’Alessio, who attended medical school in Peru, mentioned that he was wavering between a career in clinical care or academia. “Landon invited me to try science to see if I liked it,” he recalls.
King worked in the same lab as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Agre, who studies aquaporin water channels. “It turned out to be very inspiring,” says D’Alessio—and transformative.
After completing his Osler residency in 2004, D’Alessio joined the pulmonary and critical care fellowship program and spent the next four years doing research, often toiling 10 to 12 hours a day in the lab and publishing papers. Today, D’Alessio studies acute lung inflammation and has helped discover cells critical in repairing lung damage. But he also sees patients. In other words, he is a physician-scientist.
Now, thanks to a special new pathway, trainees who want to follow that career track will have an easier time finding the right mentors during their residency. Recognizing a national shortage of physician-scientists, Osler Medical Training Program Director Sanjay Desai, Department of Medicine Director Mark Anderson and others have helped to create a new physician-scientist pathway. They’ve tapped Robert Brodsky, director of the Division of Hematology, to lead it.
In his new role, Brodsky, who joined the faculty in 1997, aims to actively recruit and match trainees with mentors across disciplines. He will also seek ways to fast-track training, e.g., by carving out more lab time during the third year of residency.
Brodsky’s research focuses on bone marrow failure, the complement system (proteins in the blood that enhance antibody response) and hemolytic anemia. He and his colleagues performed the first successful half-matched bone marrow transplant for a patient with sickle cell disease. This approach is now widely used to cure select patients with sickle cell disease.
Johns Hopkins Medicine: Robert Brodsky, M.D.
“Rob brings tremendous passion, experience and leadership to this role,” says Desai. “His own discovery of science during clinical training and his dedication and mentorship of countless trainees give him unique insight into how to build this program and nurture the thrill of discovery.”
Broadly defined, physician-scientists have earned an M.D.—alone or combined with other advanced degrees—and devote a substantial percentage of their time to biomedical research, including basic science and translational projects.
But the number of physicians who choose this career path is shrinking. Barriers to aspiring physician-scientists include major cuts in NIH funding, difficulties understanding grant applications, lower compensation as compared with clinical care, lack of diversity and poor work/life balance. The average age a physician-scientist receives his or her first independent research grant is 45. As a result, many who start out on this road opt out.
Yet most of the transformative advances in medicine come from physician-scientists, says Brodsky. He cites 2016 Lasker Award winners—Johns Hopkins geneticist Gregg Semenza and William Kaelin (Osler, 1983, and former ACS)—as examples. “It’s imperative that Johns Hopkins continues to lead in this area.”
“The Osler residency and Johns Hopkins are built on the promise of scientific advances in medicine,” says Anderson, “and we believe we should lead in strengthening this critical pipeline. It’s a good time to consider how to reconfigure the program so our trainees don’t waste any time finding mentors to nurture that interest. We want these trainees to remain here as fellows and/or faculty members.”
Establishing a physician-scientist pathway leader in the Department of Medicine is part of universitywide efforts to inspire independent research careers and mentorships in academic medicine.
For D’Alessio, this is welcome news. He hopes some new residents will be directed to his lab to help him study treatments. “My goal is to turn on cells to manipulate the lung system to repair damage and save lives,” says D’Alessio. “It will take years, and there are lots of challenges, but it’s also exciting.”