Seminar: "Precision Medicine or Privileged Medicine? Connecting Biomedical Research to Health Care Practice."

Target Audience: Anyone

Speaker: Dr. Bob Campbell, Adjunct Associate Professor of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology and Biotechnology at Brown University

Session format: Seminar

Short description: When developing a drug, biomarker, or treatment approach, how will it actually work in patients, and how will it change the decisions that are made during treatment? Doctors, patients, and other stake holders each have different concerns about the costs/benefits at each stage of a medical treatment, and these concerns are not always effectively met. We focus on these issues in a teaching setting at Brown University (USA) as a lot of the tools for translating research into healthcare are generally relevant to how we do collaborative research.

Discussion points:

• Predicting how a research result will work in patients, and how will it change the decisions that are made during treatment.
• Addressing biases in the design and implementation of biomedical research trials that otherwise prevent treatments from having broad medical impact
• Considering these features as part of thr collaborative research and teaching process more generally.

EVERYONE IS WELCOME!

About the speaker:

Dr. Bob Campbell is Adjunct Associate Professor of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology and Biotechnology at Brown University. He worked for 28 years in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry as a scientist, project leader and executive, participating in successful global development of 10 new medicines now used in oncology, cardiovascular, metabolic, endocrine, and reproductive medicine. As a bench scientist, Bob was an inventor of new protein engineering platforms that combine multiple pharmacological activities into one protein. As a leader he managed molecular biology, reproductive biology, bioinformatics, and protein engineering departments for both US research and global pipelines, playing an active role in licensing and go/no go decisions for hits, leads, drug candidates and new technologies.
In parallel to his industry career, Bob remained active in academic research and teaching, specializing in protein engineering and molecular pharmacology of glycoprotein hormones (1990s-2000s collaboration with William Moyle at Rutgers) and comparative genomics and repurposing of drug target chemistry to neglected tropical diseases (2000s-present). The latter work has been pursued as a faculty member in the Josephine Bay Paul Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory with the support of NIH (R01) and Foundation funding. He has developed graduate and undergraduate level coursework at Brandeis University (2003-2010) and Brown University (2017-present). In addition to his teaching, he currently co-leads the Medicine Adaptive Pathway to Patients (MAPPs) subteam of the Drug Information Association's Adaptive Design and Bayesian Scientific Working Groups, and is a Whitman Associate at the Marine Biological Labotatory in Woods Hole, MA.