New director to oversee expanded GCRC role
by Dick PetersonPublic Relations
Newly appointed GCRC director Peter Wilson, M.D., plans to expand MUSC’s General Clinical Research Center to include community and statewide investigations into metabolic syndrome, a series of inter-related diseases with common risk factors.
Dr.
Peter Wilson
Wilson, who comes to MUSC from 20 years with Boston University’s Framingham Heart Study, sees South Carolina as particularly fertile ground for research into heart disease, hypertension, stroke, diabetes and renal disease. These are all exacerbated by abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol and a fasting glucose level above 110.
“We want to identify these people by expanding the classic in-hospital GCRC to focus on the community,” Wilson said. He is particularly interested in how the effects of risk factors vary between the state’s black and white populations.
“It would be great if we could rejuvenate the Charleston Heart Study,” Wilson said. “We could revisit the concept of tracking both whites and blacks in the same region for the same diseases.
To Jack Feussner, M.D., chair of the Department of Medicine, who has known him for nearly 30 years, Wilson’s hiring is a particularly good fit, both for research and for translating the advances of medical research into benefit for the patient. “I predict he’ll change the focus of the GCRC leadership toward translational research—research with clinical application.”
Translational research has taken center stage among federal funding agencies in the past 18 months, Feussner estimates. “And that’s what Peter Wilson has been doing all his life. He’s the kind of person you want to have on your faculty.
“But the best thing about Peter is that it doesn’t stop there with him. As an epidemiologist, he knows what clinical questions can be addressed in research.” Feussner explained that as Congress, the National Institutes of Health and other federal research funding agencies emphasize funding support for research that directs benefits to the patient, Wilson is already thinking ahead to clinical information, activities and outcomes that could further direct and advance research protocols.
Feussner fully expects the GCRC, which is an NIH-funded center, to attract increased federal funding as it establishes and grows in its new direction.
“We were told in medical training that we could be a “triple threat,” if we succeeded in becoming world class researchers, excellent physicians and engaging and energetic teachers,” Feussner said. “Peter Wilson believed them and he pulled it off.”
Vice President for Medical Affairs and Dean of the College of Medicine Jerry Reves, M.D., knows Wilson to be a “natural leader with an infectious enthusiasm and can-do philosophy. He brings excitement about clinical research with his zeal and accomplishments in human investigation.” Reves predicts that the GCRC will continue to grow as a resource to faculty and patients.
Reves credited the improved overall operation of the GCRC to the leadership of Lyndon Key, M.D., who he said has added immensely to the new facilities. “He will be sorely missed as he concentrates his attention on the Department of Pediatrics.”
As GCRC director, Wilson has joined the faculty in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Medical Genetics. Formerly professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and director of laboratories at Framingham Heart Studies, Wilson received his medical degree at the University of Texas Medical School, San Antonio, completed his residency and fellowship at Duke University and also served as a staff associate in epidemiology at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md. Wilson went on to serve as medical officer in the Clinical Epidemiology Section, Division of Heart and Vascular Diseases at the NIH and then at Framingham, Mass.
Wilson’s wife is Peggy Lindsey, M.D., a retina specialist in the Division
of Ophthalmology at the Storm Eye Institute. They met in North Carolina
when she was a medical student at Duke and he was a resident in internal
medicine. The couple reside in downtown Charleston and have a son in college
and a daughter in high school.
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