Eva Feldman is stepping down as director of the A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute at the University of Michigan, but at the age of 65, she has no intention of retiring.

She was the founding director of the institute created with tens of millions of dollars from mall mogul A. Alfred Taubman to fund research into intractable diseases like Alzheimer's, ALS and diabetes and ran it for 10 years. It is time, she says, for her next, but not necessarily last, 10-year plan.

"I birthed a baby and it's grown to be 10. It's a tweener, now, and ready for someone else to take it to adolescence," she told Crain's, following a meeting she had with one of the finalists of a national search to replace her.

Feldman said she expects a replacement to be named by the end of June.

"We started with four people, and now we have more than 200 investigators," she said. "We're strongly established, very robust. We have the best scientist-clinicians at the university. It's time for the next director to take over. There are other things I want to do, now. This takes up a lot of time, and I want to spend more time on my own research."

Feldman will continue to run the ALS Clinic at UM. Each Tuesday, she and a small staff diagnose and treat patients with amytrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The Russell N. DeJong Professor of Neurology at the U-M Medical School, she will also continue to run her own 30-scientist laboratory, the Program for Neurology Research & Discovery.

She said her new 10-year plan has three major goals.

This would be the last trial before the procedure is approved.

As soon as Feldman was done enumerating those goals, she enumerated two more.

She wants to help get more women into research positions at major universities. "More women than men graduate from the medical school at Michigan, but there are just a blip of women who are full professors," she said.

Last Wednesday, she and the Taubman Institute hosted a symposium called "Strategies to Empower Women to Achieve Academic Success," with keynote speakers on gender equality in academic medicine and a panel discussion on how to use negotiation and networking skills for career advancement.

And she wants to raise the $5 million it will take to fund the large-animal studies she needs to do before she can launch FDA human trials using embryonic stem cells to treat Alzheimer's. She said stem-cell trials with mice with dementia have been promising.

Researchers injected two groups of Alzheimer's mice, one group with a saline solution to serve as a control, the other with stem cells. Both of those groups and a group of healthy mice were then put through three tests of cognition, including one that required finding a platform hidden in a pool of water.

Previously, both sets of Alzheimer's mice flunked the cognition tests. After the stem-cell injections, the Alzheimer's mice injected with cells performed the tests as well as healthy mice. The Alzheimer's mice injected with saline solution flunked the tests.

"I am persistent. I will get that funded," she said.

Feldman took a sabbatical this spring to go to Australia, where she helped the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne set up a neuropathy-screening program for children with diabetes, which dovetails with one of her clinical trials treating neuropathy in children. And in September she heads to Chennai, India, to set up a similar program at a hospital there.

Neuropathy is a painful condition resulting from the nerve damage that diabetes can cause.

Feldman has published more than 350 peer-reviewed articles, 60 book chapters and three books and has had continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health for more than 20 years, including 12 current grants totaling about $5.5 million.

She is past president of the Peripheral Nerve Society and served as president of the American Neurological Association from 2011 to 2013, the group's third woman president in 130 years. Last June, she was named among the 100 most influential women in Michigan by Crain's.

Continue reading here:
Eva Feldman: Stepping down, not stopping - Crain's Detroit Business