InMotion Interns Serve More Than Coffee

The Daily News
July 2, 2008
By Scott Shepard

A central mission at InMotion Musculoskeletal Institute is to recruit the scientists who will run Memphis’ medical research labs in the future. But a growing internship program is proving that InMotion can grow its own future scientists by offering meaningful jobs to students and instilling them with a passion for the work.

This summer InMotion has four college students who are getting a taste of real scientific research by taking on real projects. In the process they are learning proper research methods, from preparation to reporting to analysis. At the end of the day, they will get what many long for: status as co-author in a peer-review article.

“It’s something no other medical student gets to do,” said Seth Cooper, a second-year student at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Medicine.

Horizons broadened

Cooper is looking at perhaps nine more years of training to become an orthopedic surgeon with a focus on sports medicine.

He now hopes to combine that dream with research to help develop better orthopedic products and procedures in the future.

Cooper, a native of Nashville, is teamed this summer with UT-Campbell Clinic orthopedic surgeon Robert Heck Jr. on a research project involving bone metastasis, specifically cancer of the humerus, the long bone connecting the shoulder to the elbow.

“Sports medicine is about taking care of a person who can’t do what they love; fixing their problem,” Cooper said. “I had never looked at oncology and orthopedics before.”

InMotion interns are given major roles in research projects, and not just filing and other grunt work, said Ruxi Marinescu, manager of the InMotion biomechanics laboratory, who helps oversee the interns. They are encouraged to pursue their work independently, with weekly meetings to assure they are on track.

“I’m not a micro-manager, so I’m glad we identify people who are independent,” she said.

Chris Williams is from Baton Rouge, La., and a second-year history major at Rhodes College. Though he’s just 19, Williams already knows he wants to be a doctor and is leaning toward trauma surgery. This year he’s working closely with Marinescu on InMotion’s most ambitious project to date: radio stereometric analysis (RSA), which will make InMotion only the second site in the United States to deploy this technology to medical research.

RSA uses tiny metal markers placed in strategic points on both sides of an orthopedic implant, such as an artificial hip. Like a sailor peering at the stars with a sextant, RSA marks the exact points of the markers after surgery. In subsequent scans it can determine shifts as slight as 1/200th of an inch, smaller than a human hair.

These tiny shifts provide clues about the long-term durability of the implant. Engineers can make lab modifications and, using RSA with other InMotion technology, subject the modified device to decades of simulated use in a matter of weeks. The result is knowing quickly if the change was an improvement, all in a lab.

“We’re looking at the micromotion of hips,” Williams said. “I’m learning stuff I would learn nowhere else.”

Beyond what he’s learning, Williams said, he believes the experience will make him much more competitive when he applies to medical schools.

“I get to work on RSA and get paid full-time during the summer, and then part-time over the next two semesters,” Williams said. “This is what every prospective medical student would love to have on his application.”

Stipends for both Williams and Cooper are paid through a grant from SunTrust Bank.

Raising leaders

One critical lesson for interns, Marinescu said, is that in the best research most of the work goes into setting up an experiment – thinking through the process again and again, planning for variables and preventing them from occurring. Part of that process also is preparing for documentation.

“We spend most of our time preparing, and then spend a few days in the lab,” she said. “After that we spend a lot of time analyzing the data. The interns are young, but they are learning how to do the research properly.”

InMotion’s approach to training interns is rare but not unique, said Chris Przybyszewski, director of grants and communications at the company. By starting from scratch, InMotion had the luxury of looking at how others operated internships. Since the goal was to raise well-trained and creative new scientists, InMotion chose to copy one of the most successful programs in the world at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

“Most interns only get a summer, but St. Jude has done it this way for years,” Przybyszewski said. “We don’t have many clinical scientists in orthopedics to begin with, so we either find talent that we can bring to Memphis, or we grow it in Memphis.”

The odds are very high that Williams and Cooper – along with comparable interns – will leave Memphis for advanced training. Przybyszewski conceded that the InMotion experience will make the interns strong recruiting targets in competing cities. But InMotion is not aiding and abetting the competition.

”When you think of orthopedics anywhere in the world you think of UT and Campbell Clinic,” Cooper said. “The future of medicine is research, so even if I’m in Los Angeles 10 years from now, I can still be part of Memphis research.”

Most clinical research is done simultaneously at sites across the country, Przybyszewski said, so a Campbell Clinic scientist will need properly trained clinical scientists all over the United States. While aiding patients in other cities, he said, InMotion also is training future collaborators.

“InMotion’s effort to extend their research and translational mission to such a wide array of interns is a great service to our community,” said Steve Bares, president of Memphis Bioworks Foundation. “This is one of the key ways that Memphis will build a vibrant biomedical workforce and we all applaud their approach.”