I think it’s mainly due to a conscientious effort to recruit great researchers working in the area of immunology. It was a deliberate plan from two organizations—the Walther Oncology Center, which is  a joint venture between the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Walther Cancer Institute, a private institute, along with the Department of Microbiology and Immunology within the IU medical school.

I became the first scientific director of the Center in 1988. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as part of my efforts to recruit outstanding investigators to Indiana University in a number of different departments in the medical school, one of the areas I concentrated on was immunology.

At the time, it was a joint effort between the department and the Center to recruit a number of investigators. Some people that I helped to recruit in that round of appointments included Michael Klemsz, Byoung Kwon, and Janice Blum. Their primary appointments were with the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, but they were also members of the Walther Oncology Center.

I became chair of the department in 1997. That’s when I went all out, with the help of the University and the Center, to really upgrade the area of immunology and recruit a large number of investigators, mainly from Harvard and the National Institutes of Health. Some of those people include: Ghalib Alkhatib from the  National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); Randy Brutkiewicz also from NIAID; Alexander Dent from the National Cancer Institute; Johnny He from the Dana Farber Cancer Institute; and Mark Kaplan from the Harvard School of Public Health. We’ve also brought in two other researchers who were already on campus—David Donner and Arun Srivastava. This has all taken place in the last four years and they have been publishing quite outstanding work in that time.

How would you describe the significance and long-term impact of their work for your institution?

Extremely positive.

How important is teamwork and collaboration in achieving your goals?

I purposely brought in people who were not working in similar areas. We wanted to assemble a group that would complement each other and thus enhance their ability to collaborate with established researchers in the department and other departments on campus, as well as collaborate with the new researchers we were bringing in.

Do teamwork and collaboration entail significant involvement of your researchers with groups external to your institution?

Yes, they interact quite a bit with researchers outside Indiana University because these investigators all came from great places, and they are still collaborating with their previous colleagues. A lot of our new hires are young people who are just beginning to make their own way, so I believe that you’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg of what’s going to come out of here.

What is your prediction for the state of our knowledge about immunology 10 years from now?

Immunology interfaces with many areas. It’s important to understanding the future of such areas as stem cell transplantation and vaccine production and use. It essentially has its tentacles in many areas.

What role did the administration play in fostering research in this area?

Administrators at all levels really helped the Center and department, in that we had to have people who were committed to improving research and accepting a vision that required a very large-scale recruitment process. The administration from the Indiana University School of Medicine from as high up as the Dean’s office and the Board of Directors of the Walther Cancer Institute were all behind this, and it was mainly because of their help and acceptance that we were able to get all these great people.

What were the greatest challenges for your institution in performing and presenting its work?

The greatest challenges were to get the right people, to find space in which they could do their research, and to get internal and external funding to recruit new investigators so that their recruitment package was competitive. The institution is doing this very well. We anticipate great growth and productivity based on these efforts.

What research fields or capabilities do you see as critical for the future of your institution? What are the implications of your institution's work for the future of immunology and neighboring fields?

There are two areas that the school is heavily involved in. These are very important and dovetail quite beautifully with the recruitment effort. The first area is stem cell transplantation. For example, my research group played an extremely important role in starting the field of cord blood transplantation. We did a lot of the associated basic biology here, and the first five cord bloods that were ever used for stem cell transplantation in the world came out of my lab. These were cells that were collected from an obstetrical unit from out of state and sent to my lab, where we tested them, froze them, restored them, and hand-delivered them to the site of the transplant for treating Fanconi anemia and leukemia.

One of the very interesting things about cord blood is that it appears—and this has been substantiated by a number of critical studies—that there’s less graft-versus-host disease with cord blood than with bone marrow, especially when using cord samples from unrelated donors.

We have on this campus now a very heavy effort, not only on studying the biology and immunology of cord blood, but the actual clinical transplantation. The head of the pediatric stem cell unit is Franklin Smith. He and a number of individuals, including one of his colleagues, Blythe Thomson, have now done over 40 unrelated cord blood transplants. Dr. Smith has a secondary faculty appointment in our department.

Smith, Thomson, and colleagues recently published a paper in Blood that described the immunology of the clinical transplants (B.G. Thomson, K.A. Robertson, D. Gowan, D. Heilman, H.E. Broxmeyer, D. Emanuel, P. Kotylo, Z. Brahmi, F.O. Smith, "Analysis of engraftment, graft-versus-host disease, and immune recovery following unrelated donor cord blood transplantation," 96[8]:2703-11, 15 October 2000). This was the first large-scale study in which the immunological consequences of cord-blood transplants were evaluated. With this clinical unit and our expertise in basic immunology, we can now actually ask a lot more questions, which then allows us to plan even better ways to treat patients using cord blood, bone marrow, and mobilized peripheral blood stem cells.

The second area is cancer. Patients’ immune systems are tremendously compromised during chemotherapy and radiation therapy. With our growing immunological expertise, we can now better evaluate the immune status of the patients. Therefore this is a second area for interfacing between the lab and the clinic for translational research.

We’re also looking into ways to use information about immunology to perhaps help patients get rid of tumors altogether. For example, my lab has been collaborating with a number of people on this campus, including Kenneth Cornetta, the head of the adult stem cell transplant unit and also a secondary faculty member in our department. We use retroviral vectors to put genes for certain immune-active cytokines into tumor cells in mice. We’ve been very successful with the mice. Having researchers who understand immunology opens up another area, which is the use of gene therapy as antitumor agents.

Overall, we’ve brought together a critical mass of people who can do the lab work and do the clinical work to understand not only the basic mechanism of cell biology and immunology but also to translate that information for clinical efficacy.

What would you like to convey to the general public about your institution's work?

The goals of an academic institute are not only to do good research but to train future investigators. Therefore one goal is to build up the student population to make the program stronger for the future. At the same time that we were bringing in new faculty we were upgrading the department itself, making courses more relevant and bringing in more grad students and postdocs. The department is flourishing, and this will be obvious in the next year or two when people see that the rating of this department has gone up tremendously. The goal is not only to do cutting-edge research but also to train future investigators who will then become leaders in immunological research.

What factors or circumstances led your institution to its work? [Or, what was the impetus for the hiring campaign?]

To move us to another level. Indiana University is the only medical school in the state, and is also the second-largest medical school in the US in terms of the number of medical students admitted each year, which is in the range of 280-90 annually. It’s a very well-kept secret and I think ISI hit on it when they saw the rankings in publications increase.

I think the rankings are also going up in a lot of other disciplines in our medical school, in addition to immunology. There’s a very conscientious effort to improve the quality of faculty.

What are the implications of your institution's work for the future of immunology in terms of practical applications?

Really the key is that when you have the right people interacting you can move information from the lab to the clinic a lot faster.

What are your institution's immediate and long-term research goals? What research fields or capabilities do you see as critical for the future of your institution?

The long-term goals of the Indiana University School of Medicine are to keep improving, to increase in the ranking system, which means not only how things work within the school and the quality of teaching, but also the amount of NIH and like-type funding we garner. The School would like to move into the top-ten rankings of public medical schools in terms of NIH funding and clearly into the 20s or teens some day in terms of NIH funding for all medical schools in the US.

What’s critical to make this happen is finding new ways to fund programs on campus and bringing outstanding new people here to work, starting right at the top. For example there are a lot of new searches for chairs of departments going on right now. We’re looking for capabilities within people for research and their ability to interact and collaborate on and off campus.

Dr. Harold E. Broxmeyer
Indiana University School of Medicine
Department of Microbiology and Immunology
Indianapolis, IN, USA