In 1996, when Scott Weiss became a professor at Harvard Medical School, he took over the leadership of the Channing Laboratory Respiratory Unit and took the unit from 3 faculty members and 3 million dollars a year in NIH funding to 25 faculty and over 65 million dollars in research funding over a 10 year period. He is currently an Associate Director of the Channing Laboratory Division of Network Medicine, Department of Medicine in Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a Professor at Harvard Medical School. In this capacity, he co-leads a research group of 25 investigators and 100 staff members involved in examining the environmental exposures and genetic risk factors that cause asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
He initially trained as a respiratory epidemiologist and began his career as a clinician. In 1978, he founded the Pulmonary Division at Beth Israel Hospital where he had been chief resident. His long-standing research interests have been in the area of environmental and genetic risk factors for the development of asthma and (COPD). His initial work concerned the role of environmental tobacco smoke exposure in the development of asthma. He then studied the effect of airway responsiveness in populations on the development of COPD and the effect of asthma and allergies in children and young adults on the natural history of COPD. In 1994, he developed a strong interest in the genetics/genomics of asthma. By 2000, when the human genome was mapped, he was fully funded to do research on the genetics of airways disease. At that time, they identified the vitamin D receptor as a gene for asthma and currently have a clinical trial underway to see if giving vitamin D to pregnant women will prevent asthma and allergies in their offspring. If successful, this trial could provide the first translational treatment for a complex trait based on genetics. This work has fueled a broader interest in how micronutrients modify maternal epigenetics, fetal gene expression, and influence subsequent disease risk in the fetus. He is also exploring the role of the gut microbiome in asthma development. Finally, he has also been interested in asthma pharmacogenomics. His broader interest in all of these research endeavors is translational genomics or personalized medicine, using genomic markers to better predict drug treatment response and disease treatments and outcomes.
He is currently funded by the NIH and has been for the past 38 years. He has been a recipient of an NHLBI MERIT award. During this time, he has collaborated with a variety of investigators on cooperative studies such as the Childhood Asthma Management Program (CAMP), SHARE, ABRIDGE, and EVE, and has served in an administrative capacity with the NHLBI for a variety of genetic epidemiologic programs including the Special Emphasis Panel on the Use of NHLBI Specimens, the Oversight Committee for the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Asthma, the NHLBI Genotyping Service Study Section, the T-32 training grant study section, over 30 NHLBI workshops, and the oversight panel for the Genotyping and Sequencing Service. He has led multidisciplinary cooperative studies of asthma and COPD, and he has international research experience in: China, Norway, Mexico, England, Costa Rica, and the Netherlands. He is the Co-Principal Investigator of the only training program in the Clinical and Genetic Epidemiology of Lung Diseases (HL-07427). He has trained a total of 37 investigators, 8 of these trainees have reached the rank of professor, and all remain in academic medicine. He has authored or co-authored over 700 papers and co-written and co-edited four books, including a comprehensive textbook of Respiratory Genetics. Scott Weiss was recently identified as being in the top 1% of biomedical researchers in terms of impact during the period of 1996-2011 (Eur J Clin Invest. 2013 Dec; 43(12): 1339-65 PMID:24134636).
"Personalized medicine is being able to translate the revolution in molecular genomic diagnostics, prognostics, and therapeutics into clinical practice. Partners Personalized Medicine’s mission is to enable this process for researchers, clinicians and patients at Partners Health Care. I was recruited to be the Director of Partners Personalized Medicine after a competitive search across Partners Health Care. It has been an incredible privilege for me to lead the Center, and to work with our dedicated faculty and staff, who are excited about our mission, and all that we are doing to advance personalized medicine at Partners. We believe we have one of the most exciting programs in personalized medicine in the US, and it is because of the incredibly dedicated staff of the Center that we are so successful in executing on our shared vision." -Scott T. Weiss
