The National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL), the scientific research arm of the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA), has named Ronald N. Hines, new Associate Director for Health. Dr. Hines most recently was a Professor of Pediatrics and Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
In his new role as Associate Director for Health, Dr. Hines will shape the Agency’s health research strategies, leading a staff of more than 300 scientists, technicians, and administrators within three research divisions and one research core unit.
Dr. Hines’ extensive background in toxicology and pharmacokinetics research has focused on how both drugs and environmental toxicants alter gene expression. After earning a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, he completed a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, focusing on the identification and sequence characterization of genes responsible for the metabolic disposition of environmental toxicants and drugs. He then spent six years at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Eppley Institute for Research for Cancer and Allied Diseases in Omaha, Nebraska before accepting an associate professorship at Wayne State University’s School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. In 1999, he was recruited to the Medical College of Wisconsin, where his focus on environmental toxicants expanded to encompass pediatrics.
“I had been working in the areas of drug and toxicant metabolism and gene regulation for several years, but it was always focused on the adult. I never thought that response might be different in children,” said Dr. Hines. A faculty colleague and neonatologist, D. Gail McCarver—now his wife—asked him to consult on one of her grants and challenged him to look specifically at the mechanisms of drug metabolism in children. Dr. Hines soon discovered that there was a paucity of data on the subject. “I set out in a very purposeful way to develop an approach for evaluating how different enzyme systems change as a function of age,” He said his group worked to build a comprehensive human liver tissue bank representative of every age group up to 18 years; they then were able to carefully characterize the changes in enzyme systems that happen as humans develop. “Now, we know that a lot of those enzyme systems increase dramatically during the first year of life,” Dr. Hines said, “You can see dramatic changes in how one might respond to a drug, simply because of age. We never knew that before.”
Dr. Hines said that one of the most exciting outcomes of that project was that the data collected from the tissue samples were incorporated into new predictive modeling software, including programs used by US EPA.
Now, because Dr. Hines is tasked with overseeing programs in toxicology, as well as epidemiology and clinical medicine, he has the opportunity to help shape and implement similar approaches to understanding toxicity pathways, or cellular response to chemical exposures, that cause adverse health effects.
Dr. Hines cites US EPA initiatives and collaborations like ToxCast and Tox21, which use high-throughput screening structures to rapidly screen chemicals and chemical mixtures for toxicity, as examples of programs that he hopes to further develop to better enable US EPA to recognize potential toxicants and prevent exposure and disease.
Also among his directives is building research collaborations, both internally and externally.
“Complex factors work together to impact the disease process,” explained Dr. Hines. “The way we’re going to be able to better understand those is to have multiple disciplines approaching them at the same time, working as a team—engineers, mathematicians, economists, physicists. Getting people working together to really look at a problem from multiple angles and come up with the best solution—I think that’s critically important.”
“Ron demonstrates the type of people skills that motivate and inspire people,” says NHEERL Director Hal Zenick. “His leadership, managerial, and scientific competencies are widely known, and I'm extremely proud that he is now part of the US EPA research family.”