Dr. Mitch Drumm - CF Pioneer (and hero to CF community)

Living legends. One of them is Dr. Mitch Drumm. He was part of the team with Dr. Francis Collins who discovered the gene that cause CF. They were all at the University of Michigan. You’ll hear the connection Laura and Mitch have, and they didn’t know it until this podcast! Dr. Drumm is a living CF hero.

Dr. Drumm earned his doctoral degree while in a lab with Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the NIH and at that time, in 1989 the pair co-discovered the gene that causes CF.

The discovery of the gene that causes CF was one of the biggest contributions to science, and even though science didn’t move as fast as we wanted in 1989 when this gene was discovered, it still moved pretty fast….look where we are today with a modulator drug that corrects the underlying condition of CF, and more possibilities in the pipeline.

Dr. Mitch Drumm is one of those scientific hero’s. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genome sciences, vice chair of translational research, director of the Research Institute for Children’s healh and is at the CF Clinic at Case Western Reserve University.

Because of the successes in cystic fibrosis, Dr. Drumm brought together faculty from across the Case Western Reserve University campus in 2015 to form The Research Institute for Children’s Health. This institute was launched to implement laboratory-to-clinic research programs for other rare, genetic disorders, patterned after the CF approach. Dr. Drumm currently serves as the Institute’s director, using it as infrastructure for rare disease research, but also as a platform for community outreach.

His current research in CF focuses on gene editing approaches to therapy and he has active programs to understand altered metabolism in CF, problems of CF intestines, and how genes that modify CF disease severity convey their effects.

Dr. Drumm also coordinates the Ohio Valley CF Consortium every year.

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