Inner Workings: Taking evolution to the clinic.

نویسنده

Elie Dolgin

چکیده

Andrew Read is most at home around mice, mosquitoes, malaria, and math. An evolutionary biologist at Pennsylvania State University in State College, Read has built a career working with animal and theoretical models to study how pathogens develop drug resistance. Yet after 30 years in the laboratory, he decided to investigate a different biological system: doctors and patients. Read sought a unique kind of research leave, but had to make the case to his dean. “If you want to be a rainforest ecologist, you’ve got to go hang out in a rainforest,” he recalls saying when he made his pitch. “Likewise, if you want to be a hospital ecologist, you’ve got to hang out in a hospital.” From March to August 2014, Read relocated to the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, where he tagged along with infectious-disease specialists making their rounds in the hospital ward. Every day, he watched the physicians struggle with difficult, sometimes life-threatening, cases of drug resistance, and their limited range of antibiotic options. He also attended weekly meetings dedicated to building coordinated, hospital-wide strategies for antibiotic use and stewardship. The experience “was a complete eyeopener,” Read says. “You get a look at what’s in the drug toolkit that doctors are working with, and the bottom of the bucket is very visible.” Read’s clinical secondment revealed what might be possible when basic researchers and physicians collaborate as part of an area sometimes called “evolutionary medicine.” It also lay bare just how much more both professions need to learn about drug resistance.

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