printable version5 Questions: Mark Davis on the school's newest institute
Immunity, Transplantation and Infection will be the focus
BY MITZI BAKER
Mark Davis
Mark Davis, PhD, the Burt and Marion Avery Professor in Immunology, last month became the first director of the Stanford’s new Institute on Immunity, Transplantation and Infection. The institute is one of four that the medical school has established in recent years in a bid to encourage larger scale interdisciplinary projects, uniting basic researchers with clinicians. (The other three institutes are focused, respectively on cardiovascular medicine, neuroscience and cancer and stem cell biology.)
Davis came to Stanford in 1983 after postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health, where he discovered the mechanism by which the cells of the immune system recognize foreign invaders and act to destroy them. He is also the chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. Mitzi Baker, a writer in the medical school’s Office of Communication & Public Affairs, talked with Davis last week about the significance of his new post.
1. What’s the thinking behind lumping these three disciplines—immunology, transplantation and infection—in one institute?
DAVIS: Much of how an infectious disease organism works has to do with how the immune system responds to it. By the same token, why the immune system does the things it does is because of the different kinds of nasty things that are out there waiting to feast on your flesh.
In transplantation, the biggest barrier is, of course, the immune system, where you are trying to overcome the natural defense reactions against the introduction of foreign tissue. And autoimmune diseases are thought to be triggered partially by responses to infectious diseases.
A major rationale for this new institute is that all three of these areas are interconnected.
2. You’re well known for identifying and cloning the T cell receptor, and you’ve published a lot of important work since then. How does this prepare you to run this new institute?
DAVIS: I have a lot of experience in the basic science area, but I also have some experience in the interface of basic science with clinical work. About eight years ago we developed an assay that allows scientists and doctors to rapidly analyze specific T cells in patient samples, which made me aware of the pressing need for better diagnostics.
But I don’t see the directors of the institutes as dictating programs for other people to follow. A lot of the work will be listening to the ideas of other people and figuring out how to implement the best ones.
And no one person has all the expertise that would be required to know what is going on in all these different fields. So it’s also great that Carlos Esquivel [the Arnold and Barbara Silverman Professor in Pediatric Transplantation in the School of Medicine] has agreed to be the associate director, because he really brings in a huge amount of clinical expertise that I don’t have.
3. Do you worry that the shift to these new institutes, with their emphasis on collaborative group projects, undermines the autonomy of the individual investigator?
DAVIS: Certainly not. Individual investigators are the backbone of success in science at Stanford and everywhere else, but the institutes can provide facilities and programs. They can make it easier to know people across these traditional boundaries and to work with them and to push on into the future. Through the institute structure, we can bring together people from these different backgrounds and have the immunologists talk to the transplantation surgeons and the transplantation surgeons talk to the infectious disease specialists in a more organized and ambitious way. We’re not going to force anybody to do anything.
4. So what do you hope your new institutes can accomplish over the next 10 years?
DAVIS: One of the goals is to build new space. We have an aging infrastructure here, and we need new space and specialized facilities. The first facility, which we hope to open soon, will be an immune monitoring unit. That could have a big impact on intergrating information about patients’ immune systems into the way they’re treated. We’ll hire some new people, though it isn’t likely to be a huge number compared with the number of people who are already here. In fact, one of the rationales for the institutes is that we already have a critical mass of people with this sort of interest. We just want to build better lines of communication between them and give them another kind of structure they can play in.
5. I understand that you’re a big Bob Dylan fan. What lyrics come to mind as you take on this new role?
DAVIS: The most relevant quote I can think of is “Leave your stepping stones behind, you’d better use your sense. Forget what you have gathered from coincidence.” This to me means that you have to take each day as it comes and not necessarily rely on previous experience about what works and doesn’t work. The institute is a new kind of structure and we just have to feel our way.