Eva Feldman: Stepping down, not stopping

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June 11, 2017 12:15 am
Eva Feldman: Stepping down, not stopping
By TOM HENDERSON

Eva Feldman is stepping down as director of the A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute at the University of Michigan, but at the age of 65, she has no intention of retiring.

She was the founding director of the institute — created with tens of millions of dollars from mall mogul A. Alfred Taubman to fund research into intractable diseases like Alzheimer's, ALS and diabetes — and ran it for 10 years. It is time, she says, for her next, but not necessarily last, 10-year plan.

"I birthed a baby and it's grown to be 10. It's a tweener, now, and ready for someone else to take it to adolescence," she told Crain's, following a meeting she had with one of the finalists of a national search to replace her.

Feldman said she expects a replacement to be named by the end of June.

"We started with four people, and now we have more than 200 investigators," she said. "We're strongly established, very robust. We have the best scientist-clinicians at the university. It's time for the next director to take over. There are other things I want to do, now. This takes up a lot of time, and I want to spend more time on my own research."

Feldman will continue to run the ALS Clinic at UM. Each Tuesday, she and a small staff diagnose and treat patients with amytrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The Russell N. DeJong Professor of Neurology at the U-M Medical School, she will also continue to run her own 30-scientist laboratory, the Program for Neurology Research & Discovery.

She said her new 10-year plan has three major goals.

Complete stem-cell trials on early-stage ALS patients. She said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is in the process of dotting i's and crossing t's on approval to begin later this year a combined Phase 2b/3 trial on 140 ALS patients at 10 surgical sites across the country. Patients get injections in their spinal cords of large amounts of stem cells, with earlier trials proving the safety of the procedure and showing efficacy in slowing the progression of the disease.

This would be the last trial before the procedure is approved.

Feldman is on the planning committee of the National Academy of Medicine and wants to use her position to help researchers around the country copy her model of using philanthropy to do academic research that translates into patient care.
Get some diabetes drugs under investigation by her program for neurology into the market. A Phase 2 trial is underway on Salsalate, an old anti-inflammatory drug, for treatment of neuropathy. And her group is conducting FDA trials on three ALS drugs on behalf of different pharmaceutical companies.

As soon as Feldman was done enumerating those goals, she enumerated two more.

She wants to help get more women into research positions at major universities. "More women than men graduate from the medical school at Michigan, but there are just a blip of women who are full professors," she said.

Last Wednesday, she and the Taubman Institute hosted a symposium called "Strategies to Empower Women to Achieve Academic Success," with keynote speakers on gender equality in academic medicine and a panel discussion on how to use negotiation and networking skills for career advancement.

And she wants to raise the $5 million it will take to fund the large-animal studies she needs to do before she can launch FDA human trials using embryonic stem cells to treat Alzheimer's. She said stem-cell trials with mice with dementia have been promising.

Researchers injected two groups of Alzheimer's mice, one group with a saline solution to serve as a control, the other with stem cells. Both of those groups and a group of healthy mice were then put through three tests of cognition, including one that required finding a platform hidden in a pool of water.

Previously, both sets of Alzheimer's mice flunked the cognition tests. After the stem-cell injections, the Alzheimer's mice injected with cells performed the tests as well as healthy mice. The Alzheimer's mice injected with saline solution flunked the tests.

"I am persistent. I will get that funded," she said.

Feldman took a sabbatical this spring to go to Australia, where she helped the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne set up a neuropathy-screening program for children with diabetes, which dovetails with one of her clinical trials treating neuropathy in children. And in September she heads to Chennai, India, to set up a similar program at a hospital there.

Neuropathy is a painful condition resulting from the nerve damage that diabetes can cause.

Feldman has published more than 350 peer-reviewed articles, 60 book chapters and three books and has had continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health for more than 20 years, including 12 current grants totaling about $5.5 million.

She is past president of the Peripheral Nerve Society and served as president of the American Neurological Association from 2011 to 2013, the group's third woman president in 130 years. Last June, she was named among the 100 most influential women in Michigan by Crain's.
"Papa, what's this?"

Al Taubman began funding Feldman's neurology program in 2003 and had donated a total of $7 million to her research by 2005, when he told her he wanted to up the ante.

She told him that rather than donate it all to her work, it would make more sense to come up with something more institutional, which became the Taubman Institute, to fund high-risk, high-reward translational research.

The institute was launched in July 2007 with additional funding from Taubman of $15 million.

In 2010, Taubman invited Feldman to his house for dinner. There, he handed her a check for $22 million.

"'Papa, what's this?,'" she recounted to Crain's.

"'You know, I'm having surgery tomorrow,'" she quoted him as saying. God forbid, in case he didn't make it, giving her a check before surgery would make it much easier than waiting for a will to get settled after.

Two years later, Taubman upped the ante, again, this time with a check for $56 million. It was also time to put his name, and the institute's name, on a building.

"He didn't want it, but it was the thing to do," Feldman said.

While there is a brick-and-mortar building that bears his name on the school's main campus, the institute has only a handful of employees and operates more as a virtual institute, funding researchers based in labs universitywide through a grant process.

More than 200 investigators are working on a wide range of projects through about 40 active grants. Translational research is underway in neuroscience, bioinformatics, Alzheimer's, ALS, depression, sports medicine, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and neurological disorders.

The Taubman Institute funding also eventually led to the founding of the Center for RNA Biomedicine at UM and the school's M Stem Cell Laboratory, and Taubman himself was instrumental in the launch of the Forbes Institute for Cancer Discovery at UM in 2016, earlier introducing philanthropist Sidney Forbes to one of UM's star cancer researchers, Max Wicha.

"Al told Sid to step up and introduced him to Max," said Feldman.

Forbes and his wife, Madeline, donated $17.5 million for the institute.

Taubman didn't just write checks. He had an avid interest in the research and frequently called Feldman or visited.

"I had the only billionaire clipping service," she said. "I would get a stack of clippings he cut out each week. He'd go through the Sunday New York Times looking for science articles, and he clipped the London papers and financial publications.

"He got so excited when he found out his secretary could do PDFs and send them instantly instead of having to wait on the mails," she said. "There are a couple of things we are doing now that were ideas that came from him. I probably would have come across them in journals, but he got them to me first.

"I really miss him," she said. Taubman died in April 2015. "We had an extra, extra large lab coat with his name on it for him, and he'd put it on when he visited. He used to say, 'I've done really well so you can do good.'"
 
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