As a student at MIT in the 1970s, Roderic Pettigrew was writing his PhD thesis on how a controlled nuclear reaction in the brain, boron neutron activation therapy, could be used to treat glioblastoma multiforme.
He was also spending a lot of time at Massachusetts General Hospital, where his thesis advisor founded the physics research lab. The thought dawned on Pettigrew: Could he combine his basic science background with medicine?
“I love this stuff. I could be even more effective if I knew medicine firsthand,” Pettigrew said in a conversation on the Cancer History Project podcast with Robert Winn, director and Lipman Chair in Oncology at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center, and senior associate dean for cancer innovation and professor of pulmonary disease and critical care medicine, VCU School of Medicine.
Winn is the guest editor of The Cancer Letter and the Cancer History Project during Black History Month.
Pettigrew is chief executive officer of Engineering Health (EnHealth) and inaugural dean for Engineering Medicine (ENMED) at Texas A&M University in partnership with Houston Methodist Hospital. He is also the Endowed Robert A. Welch Chair in Medicine and founding director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.
Pettigrew went on to obtain his medical degree, working in the field as a resident in Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, when he decided it was time to combine physics with medicine. He became a resident of nuclear medicine at University of California, San Diego, in the early 1980s.
At UCSD, Pettigrew began hearing about a new diagnostic technology called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or the MRI.
“In the beginning, it was NMR, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance—which is the more accurate term. At that time, nothing was broadly known about it,” he said. “But with the background that I had in physics, I was able to teach myself, and I sort of became self-educated as a resident while at UC San Diego.”
Pettigrew quickly became an expert on NMR and started giving talks on the emerging technology. He completed his residency and worked for UK-based Picker, the first manufacturer of NMR equipment.
You don’t make advances without technological innovation. And this is a technological innovation institute.
Roderic Pettigrew
“I worked as a clinical research scientist there, and I co-developed the first cardiac imaging software for Picker. I personally installed that software on the first 10 MR scanners made, sold and installed by Picker worldwide,” he said. “I physically went to each site, installed the software, which was the cardiac specific software that I had written. I calibrated it, and then taught the radiologists and cardiologists how to use it.”
From there, Pettigrew became an assistant professor at Emory University, developing four dimensional and quantitative flow imaging in the heart and vascular system.
In 2000, Congress had mandated that NIH start a new institute, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). Pettigrew’s work piqued the interest of NIH.
Pettigrew became NIBIB’s founding director in 2002.
“This institute really fit my training so well because it is an institute created to accelerate the convergence of the quantitative and life sciences and engineering to advance biomedical technologies and improve healthcare,” Pettigrew said. “I led the building of that, up virtually from scratch, though there was a small nidus of startup staff. It had not been an office the way some institutes start out.”
The start of NIBIB was controversial.
“And in fact, the truth, Rob, is that it was openly opposed by the NIH leadership at that time,” he said. “But the reason for that, Rob, is that the NIH is appropriated a budget by Congress, and that budget has to support all of the institutes and centers at the NIH. Each institute has a line item and gets its own budget, but it’s all rolled up into a composite overall NIH budget set by Congress.
“I think that the other institutes and the NIH leadership at that time didn’t want another effective mouth at the table.”
Why was NIBIB necessary?
“There were these arguments about, well, we have engineering already in some of the institutes. We have imaging already in some institutes,” Pettigrew said. “But the external community, both the imaging community and the bioengineering community, had lobbied Congress strongly because there was not an institute that focused on the science and development of these technologies and innovations as a field to advance the research that actually catalyzes advances in the basic sciences.
The creation of NIBIB allowed for innovations in COVID-19 testing technology, Pettigrew said.
“NIBIB, indeed captured that domain and is now, I would say, the signature institute for technological advances that catalyze our understanding, and consequently the progress that we make in problem-solving and healthcare delivery,” he said. “You don’t make advances without technological innovation. And this is a technological innovation institute.”
In late 2017, Pettigrew left his role as director of NIBIB to lead a new medical program that combines engineering and medicine, ENMEd, at Texas A&M University, in partnership with Houston Methodist Hospital. ENMEd is an engineering and medical education curriculum that leads graduates to an MD and master’s degree in engineering in four years.
“Well, it is a continuation of the path I’ve been on all along,” Pettigrew said. “Our whole goal is to train medical problem-solvers and innovators. This is a new converged engineering-medicine healthcare professional, so we use a new name.
“We call them ‘physicianeers.’ That’s who we’re training. We’re training medical innovators. We are creating physicianeers. That’s the purpose. That is what’s distinctive about us.”
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