Stanford University
300 Pasteur Drive, Stanford, CA 94304
USA
Presenter: David A. Schwartz, MD
Chair, Department of Medicine
University of Colorado, Denver
Over a 30-year career shaped by a commitment to “thinking outside the box,” Department of Medicine Chair, David Schwartz, M.D. garnered a reputation as a pioneer in the burgeoning field of genetics and epigenetics, having published more than 200 papers exploring the interface between genes and environment. As DOM Chair, he aims to help build a pipeline of physician-scientists and a framework for increased collaboration between clinicians and researchers that will place the department at the leading edge of a major paradigm shift – from one-size-fits-all medicine to “true personalized medicine.”
Schwartz was born in 1953 in a working class Jewish neighborhood in Long Island, NY. After attending University of Rochester, he headed to University of California, San Diego to earn his MD, then on to Boston City Hospital, Harvard School of Public Health, and University of Washington for further study. During a stint as director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) from 2005 to 2008, he spearheaded the creation of the Epigenomics Roadmap Initiative, a five-year $500 million research effort to better understand basic mechanisms of development, and how environmental factors like diet and toxins can turn off or on genes which influence health and disease. He also helped establish the Genes Environment and Health Initiative to develop genomic tools and instruments for better measuring exposures.
In one seminal paper in the journal Nature Genetics in 2000, he and colleagues at University of Iowa showed that people with a variant of the gene TLR4 are less likely to develop airway diseases, such as asthma, when exposed to endotoxins found in household and agricultural dust or polluted air. Variants in that gene also influence risk of infectious diseases and cardiovascular disease.
Another pivotal paper he published in 2008 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, showed that the diet of a pregnant mouse could affect epigenetic marks (chemicals that decorate DNA and influence the activity of specific genes) in utero, influencing the risk of its unborn offspring to develop asthma later in life.
A third paper, published by Schwartz and colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2011, found that pulmonary fibrosis (a deadly disease long attributed to repeated injury to the lungs) is also linked to a common variant of a gene that codes for mucus production.
This disease that we used to call idiopathic (unknown etiology) pulmonary fibrosis is almost entirely genetically driven, whether it occurs sporadically or runs in families. But there are many people who have this gene variant and have just not been triggered by environmental influences to develop pulmonary fibrosis,” says Schwartz. He believes that by better understanding the mechanisms that drive such environment-gene interactions, physicians and scientists can come up with more personalized treatments and prevention programs.
He landed in Denver in 2008 to take a post as a director of the Center for Genes, Environment, and Health at National Jewish Health. In January, 2011, CU appointed him chair of its DOM after an exhaustive national search.