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Home / Washington Business - January/February 2008 / Q&A: Lewis Rumpler CEO, Institute for Systems Medicine: New research center rises in Spokane |
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Q&A: Lewis Rumpler CEO, Institute for Systems Medicine: New research center rises in Spokane |
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Written On: January/February 2008 |
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Lewis Rumpler is CEO of the Institute of Systems Medicine in Spokane. Prior to his association with ISM, he was CEO of Intech, a publicly funded technology-based economic development group in Spokane. In addition, Rumpler founded three biotechnology firms on the East Coast. He received a bachelor’s degree in biology and zoology from the University of Washington in 1980.
Q: What is the Institute for Systems Medicine and what does it do?
A: The Institute for Systems Medicine is a proposed non-profit biomedical research institute under development by a partnership between Washington State University, Gonzaga University, Providence Health Care and Empire Health Services. The intention is to catalyze a significant concentrated critical mass of researchers in the Spokane region who would undertake a research program in translational medicine, which enables research to get closer to the patient and have improved patient outcomes.
There are five research programs we're interested in — epigenomics, genomics, computational biology, chromosome biology and systems biology — all representative of the state of the art in biomedicine. The real challenge is to understand why we still have an enormous disease burden, terrible mortality rates, and relative inefficiency in our therapeutic approaches over the last three decades when there's been enormous investment in biomedical research.
Disease is quite personal. You could have, for example, prostate cancer, but one man's prostate cancer compared to another man's prostate cancer is not the same disease. The disease genotype — whatever disease you have — will have a unique, personalized molecular signature. One therapeutic approach does not fit all.
Genomics is about understanding the gene sequence. We all have our own genome. Within those genomes are maybe 30,000 genes with some significant variability that makes us all different. The gene sequence helps us understand the personalized nature of disease, treatment and disease response.
Then there are epigenetic factors — things that are outside the gene sequence. Epigenomics is a very important piece of what we're interested in studying at the institute. In fact, recent studies suggest that epigenetic factors may be as important as — if not more important than — gene sequence as related to disease.
Disease doesn't start in one day. Disease emerges over a continuum of time. Just as biology is complex, the underlying biology of disease is complex. Too often, we've been trying to look at disease simplistically. A particular pharmaceutical company or biotech company might take a drug and look at a particular target, like a particular protein or an enzyme whose action you can block with the medication.
That approach sometimes works, but when you target particular proteins or enzymes there can be a number of different biological side effects, some of which are not good. Part of the idea of systems biology is to fully understand how all the different proteins work in protein-to-protein interaction. Once you fully understand the systems biology of disease, you can pick out the best target and you can also understand how other proteins would react when you pick a certain one as a target.
This is a very important and novel way to approach disease. It clearly is at the forefront of biology.
Q: What are the differences between biomedicine and biotechnology?
A: Biotechnology refers to the practice of utilizing genes to address therapeutic areas. Biotechnology is famous for using recombinant DNA and identifying human proteins with therapeutic effects that can be reproduced for therapeutic solutions.
Biomedical research, which is much broader, encompasses all biology and looks at the complexities of life, trying to unlock the answers to complex disease. The output from biomedical research is often biotechnology in that there’s an identified human protein, but there's also the pharmaceutical world where you're using synthetic chemistry, which is not biotech-based.
Q: Your institute recently received a Department of Defense research grant. What's that all about?
A: We received about $2.1 million so far for a study on Gulf War syndrome. We are just completing our full proposal to be peer reviewed by the Department of Defense.
The theory we're looking at is an interesting one. Michael Skinner, a Washington State University professor who is also the director of the Center for Reproductive Biology and the Center for Integrated Biotechnology, published a paper that demonstrated for the first time that you can confer disease intergenerationally from a single exposure to an environmental toxic agent.
Mike took a female rat and exposed it to a fungicide used in the wine industry. He was only using this compound to see if he could interrupt or disturb the biology of reproduction in that female rat, but nothing happened. There were no underlying molecular changes.
After exposure, however, the female accidentally bred with a normal male rat. In just one generation, the male offspring developed a disease phenotype — meaning that he ended up with males that got sick. These sick males then bred with normal females and again, in the next generation, many of the males were sick.
This breeding occurred two more times up to four generations within the same experiment, and most of the males were sick.
This was a breakthrough piece of science you can't explain genomically. It was epigenetic — a permanent imprint that did not change from generation to generation from a single exposure of a female rat.
Utilizing that science, we proposed to the Department of Defense that Gulf War syndrome might not be about the Gulf War at all. It might be about the Vietnam War where you had young men and women at the sensitive reproductive age of 18 to 25 exposed to environmental toxins like Agent Orange. Soldiering is an honorable profession, and you have many multiple-generation military families.
We're going to start with an examination of compounds of interest, including Agent Orange, in this intergenerational model. If we can't prove that compounds of interest to the military have and do demonstrate an intergenerational disease phenotype, then we'll eventually look at a clinical population. But right now we’re going to attempt to prove this theory in an animal study.
Q: What stage have you reached in organizing the institute?
A: The institute is a work in progress. We have a business plan, and we've got a lot of good community support for our effort. We're in the process of raising the necessary money to fund the first five years of this institute, estimated to be $110 million. We need a facility somewhere on the order of 150,000 to 200,000 square feet.
The choice of a facility site is not a trivial matter. On one hand we could site the institute in the academic environment in the Riverpoint Campus of the University District in close proximity to our academic partners. The other alternative is to put the institute in close proximity to the clinical universe by having a building near the hospitals. We haven't made a decision at this stage.
We're also focusing on a strategic advisory board that will help guide the discussion about how this complex partnership will work on resolving some of these very important disease questions.
We've got progress on all these fronts, but we have some work to do in achieving the institute. We think that's going to occur over the next 36 months. One of the milestones will be the successful recruitment of a chief scientific officer.
Q: How many employees do you envision for the Institute for Systems Medicine?
A: We're building a model that includes 20 principal investigators. The support staff would bring you to a census of about 230 full-time employees, 70 percent of whom would have master's degrees and higher.
Q: What kind of impact could the institute have on Spokane's economy?
A: Our impact could be clearly trans-formational. We had an economic impact study, which projects that by 2025 — assuming we build our building, raise our money and operate on an annual $35 million budget — we'll be generating $150 million in annual economic impact. It's going to take some time to get there, but ultimately we hope to reach a critical mass that will be generating innovations, intellectual property, opportunities for commercialization, increased employment, cultural values, and taxes.
I suggest to community leaders that our institute is exactly the kind of investment we need to make. In the Puget Sound region, there were 30 years of investments and it's now bearing the fruit, for example, in nine biomedical research institutes.
We cannot talk our way into economic vibrancy. We have to invest.
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