Inside Duke Medicine

Symposium highlights Singapore-Duke ties

With Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore moving to a state-of-the-art new tower and about to welcome its third class of medical students, founding dean R. Sanders Williams, M.D. and current dean Ranga Krishnan, M.B., Ch.B., wanted to feature another aspect of Duke’s presence in Singapore.

So, they convened “East Meets West: Singapore-Duke Research Collaborations,” a day-long symposium held in the Levine Science Research Center in May. That meeting explored the various research programs and shared projects that are bridging the faculty here in Durham and 9,864 miles away in the island nation of Singapore.

Williams, senior vice chancellor for health affairs, was a skeptic when first presented with the idea of creating a Duke medical school overseas. Now he’s an ardent advocate of the global outreach of the Duke medical faculty.

“The opportunity to partner with Singapore to create Duke-NUS has turned out to be a golden one for Duke, and more and more of our clinical and basic science researchers are jumping in and forming strong partnerships that mirror the Duke and NUS collaboration,” said Williams.

Krishnan praised the efficiency of the country, from the airport luggage system to the way the nation’s
scientific establishment is helping to support Duke-NUS.

“We are building a vibrant school in Singapore, and it is important that we share our success stories in order to keep strengthening the connections between our two campuses,” said Krishnan.

Presentations covered seven programmatic areas and the growing opportunities for Durham based faculty to collaborate with colleagues in Singapore.

Duane Gubler, Sc.D., is one of them. An expert in dengue hemorrhagic fever and other vector-borne infectious diseases, Gubler joined Duke-NUS last year to lead the Program for Emerging Infectious Diseases.

“Emerging infectious disease epidemics are the greatest threat to Singapore’s economy,” said Gubler, explaining that Singapore’s role as a regional financial center and transportation hub exposes it to many tropical illnesses. He showed a slide of the tangled web of air routes that connect the earth’s cities, depicting the ease with which infectious diseases can now travel the world – a point underscored by the A:H1N1 influenza outbreak in the news last month. (See page 8.)

“All fevers are local, but some are more global than others,” said Christopher Woods, M.D., MPH, associate professor of medicine and a member of the Hubert-Yeargan Center for Global Health. Woods studies the etiology of febrile illness, and has found that fevers often associated with expected diagnoses are instead caused by unexpected illnesses – for example, patients with fever in Malawi were presumed to be infected with malaria, but instead were suffering from disseminated tuberculosis.

Woods is collaborating with Gubler and others at Duke-NUS to develop and test diagnostic algorithms for a genomic approach to pathogen discovery.

Similarly, Bart Haynes, M.D., director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, is collaborating with Duke-NUS to explore the development of therapeutic antibodies and preventive vaccines to combat diseases for which the body does not produce broadly neutralizing antibodies.

In a presentation on health services research, Eric Peterson, M.D., MPH, praised Singapore for its advanced level of electronic health information. He’s collaborating with David Matchar, M.D., director of health services research at Duke-NUS, to explore how Singapore’s clinical registries can be a platform for scientific discovery.

Exploring the collaboration opportunities in cancer research, Patrick Casey, Ph.D., senior vice dean of research at Duke-NUS, explained the work of Patrick Tan, M.D., Ph.D., on the Gastrome Project, which is mapping gene expression signatures in gastric cancer. Tan has produced a graphical network showing 15,000 interactions of some 3,500 genes implicated in that cancer.

Tan’s research, said Casey, is an example of how Duke investigators might connect to Duke-NUS.

“Your favorite gene is important in cancer X, but you don’t know the signaling networks most important to its mechanisms of action. You can ask Patrick about your gene’s best friends in the gastrome, which will
generate testable hypotheses about pathways in your system,” he said.

Other presentations explored the cardiovascular and metabolic disorders, clinical research on a global basis, brain sciences, and translating the Duke medical curriculum to Singapore.

Williams moderated a panel discussion at the end of the symposium, asking six Duke leaders to share their perspectives on the Duke-NUS partnership and where it’s heading.

“This is going to change Duke,” said Victor J. Dzau, M.D., chancellor for health affairs, noting that together Duke and Duke-NUS are creating a vision for a 21st century global medical school.

Explore opportunities to collaborate with Duke-NUS

Ask a colleague about his or her experiences. These Duke University School of Medicine faculty currently are engaged in joint research projects or educational initiatives:

• Ranga Krishnan, Department of Psychiatry (Dean of Duke-NUS)
• Patrick J. Casey, Pharmacology & Cancer Biology (Sr. Vice Dean)
• Robert Ken Kamei, Pediatrics (Vice Dean)
• John Rush, Psychiatry (Vice Dean)
• Franklin Charles Starmer, Jr., Computer Sciences, Biostatistics and Bioinformatics (Associate Dean)
• Shirish Shenolikar, Psychiatry (Associate Dean)
• David Virshup, Pediatrics (Program Director)
• Duane J Gubler, Medicine-Infectious Disiseases
• David Matcher, Medicine-Internal Medicine
• Mariano Agustin Garcia-Blanco, Molecular Genetics & Microbiology
• Michael CHEE Wei Liang, Psychiatry
• LEONG Kam Weng, Biomedical Engineering
• Fulton WONG, Neurobiology & Opthalmology
• Terri YOUNG, Opthalmology
• Truls Ostbye, Community & Family Med.
• George J. Augustine, Neurobiology
• Richard Keefe, Psychiatry
• LEE Tih Shih, Psychiatry
• ONG Sin Tiong, Oncology
• Ricardo Santos Pietrobon, Orthopaedic Surgery
• Antonius M.J. VanDongen, Pharmacology & Cancer Biology
• Steve Rozen, Psychiatry
• Scott Summers, Endocrinology & Metab.
• Zhang Xiaodong, Psychiatry
• Bimal Shah, Cardiology