At Wistar, managing scientists by example

'Herding cats," is how Dario C. Altieri describes his job leading the brainy scientists who form the heart of the workforce at Wistar Institute in West Philadelphia.

"It's built into the job - a strong sense of independence," said Altieri, 57, in his melodic Italian accent, which he undersells as "straight out of the Bronx or South Philly."

In March, Altieri moved from herded to herder, promoted from the Institute's chief scientific officer and Wistar Cancer Center director, to chief executive and president, succeeding Russel Kaufman, who led Wistar for 12 years.

The Institute specializes in basic biomedical research, with a focus on cancer and vaccines. Unaffiliated with a university, Wistar's scientists work full time at research, without teaching responsibilities.

"I like to manage by example," said Altieri, who still runs his own projects in his lab. "I'm one of them. I have the same priorities, the same challenges, the same aspirations and same goals.

"My role is more toward emphasizing collaboration, sharing, creating a workplace, a scientific workplace where people like to come."

What creates a good scientific workplace?

It's the environment - collegiality, mutual support. If you don't know how to do something, I'll teach you. If I have a tool that you need for your project, for your experiments, I'll give it to you and we work together. I've been in institutes where it hasn't been that way. One of my goals coming here was to create an environment that was more collaborative.

Wistar is across the street from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, arguably one of the best health institutions in the nation. Yet, you chose to partner with a Delaware hospital for cancer research. Why?

Think of this. In the U.S., 85 percent of oncology care is given in the community. If you have a very rare type of disease, you go anywhere. You need real expertise. But most tumors people get are fairly common. Patients that come to Penn are patients who have already received their diagnosis, have typically gone through many rounds of treatment and have come to places like Penn after they've failed many other approaches.

So their tumors aren't typical. Is that right?

That's right. Their tumor has evolved. The disease has changed every time we go through rounds of treatment. It's a different disease, for all practical purposes. For us, by establishing collaboration with a community cancer center - Christiana Care System in Delaware - we wanted to access patients who come to the attention of oncologists at the first diagnosis. So we had a unique opportunity to study those tumors before they had gone through many rounds of adaptation and selection.

You trained as a physician, but still run your own lab. Do you prefer research to treating patients?

Every once in a while, I miss the clinic, but I've been out of clinical practice for so long. Research is exciting. One of my mentors, I posed that very question to him: "Should I be a doctor or a scientist?" He said, "As a doctor you save one life, but as a scientist you can save a million." I liked that.

Research funding from the National Institutes of Health is drying up. How has Wistar adjusted?

It's not drying up. It has not really increased dramatically over the last few years. We've been very productive, actually. If you look at our numbers, we've been steadily holding our own or growing over the past few years, despite the downturn in federal funding.

How did you manage that?

The faculty here is solely dedicated to research. So there are no other distractions. That has [enabled us] to be more successful in grant writing. And also, we've put in place a lot of infrastructure here to facilitate that process.

Like what?

When they prepare their own grant applications, we set up a mock study section, [such as] a committee of other scientists who review grant applications for the federal government. We set those up in house - with the idea that it's better that you get criticisms from us than from a formal panel at NIH.

Managing a grant and a lab is a whole separate skill.

We sit down with our young colleagues and say you have to be careful in managing your budget. You need to think [whether] you really need this experiment that is going to eat up $10,000 of your budget.

Interview questions and answers have been edited for space.

jvonbergen@phillynews.com

215-854-2769@JaneVonBergen