W. Ian Lipkin
Walter Ian Lipkin is an American epidemiologist, microbiologist, and pathologist who is the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology and Director, Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. He also holds professorships in neurology and pathology at Columbia and directs the NIH-funded Center for Solutions for ME/CFS.
Over more than four decades, Lipkin has developed and deployed molecular and genomic methods for pathogen discovery, diagnostics, and outbreak response. His group introduced the VirCapSeq-VERT capture-sequencing platform for broad detection and surveillance of known and novel vertebrate viruses, subsequently validated for clinical use.
Lipkin's outbreak and public-health work includes investigations of encephalitis, respiratory, and vector-borne diseases; Columbia reports he was among the first to determine that West Nile virus caused the 1999 New York City encephalitis epidemic. He also served as chief science advisor to Steven Soderbergh's film Contagion and was active in scientific advising and collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In ME/CFS research, Lipkin led a multicenter, blinded study that found no association between XMRV/pMLV and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, helping resolve a high-profile controversy.
His honors include Villanova University’s Mendel Medal and election as a National Academy of Inventors Fellow.
Education
Lipkin was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and served as president of the student board in 1969. He earned a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1974 and an M.D. from Rush Medical College in 1978.As a medical student he completed a clinical clerkship at the UCL Institute of Neurology, Queen Square ; then an internship in medicine at the University of Pittsburgh ; a residency in internal medicine at the University of Washington ; and a residency in neurology at the University of California, San Francisco.
He conducted postdoctoral research in microbiology and neuroscience at The Scripps Research Institute in Michael Oldstone’s laboratory and was elected president of the Scripps Society of Fellows in 1987.
Career
Early career
In 1979, during a fellowship in London, Lipkin's first professional publication was a Letter to the Editor at the Archives of Internal Medicine, where he posed a potential correlation between eosinopenia and bacteremia in diagnostic evaluations for a bacteremic patient.While at UCL, he worked with John Newsom-Davis, who was utilizing plasmapheresis to better understand myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease.
In 1981, Lipkin began his neurology residency and worked in a local San Francisco clinic, which was about the time AIDS began to affect the local city population. Because of the social view of homosexual people at the time, very few clinicians would see patients with these symptoms. He "was watching many patients fall ill with AIDS. It took years for scientists to discover the virus responsible for the disease... 'I saw all of this, and I said, 'We have to find new and better ways to do this.'" It was during this epidemic that Lipkin took the approach of looking for a virus' genes instead of looking for antibodies in infected people as a way to speed up the diagnosis process. By the mid-1980s, Lipkin had published two papers specifically about AIDS research and transitioned into utilizing a more pathological approach to virus identification. He identified AIDS-associated immunological abnormalities and inflammatory neuropathy, which he showed could be treated with plasmapheresis and demonstrated early life exposure to viral infections affects neurotransmitter function.
1990-2000s
Lipkin was the Louise Turner Arnold Chair in the Neurosciences at the University of California, Irvine from 1990 to 2001 and was recruited shortly thereafter by Columbia University. He began his current tenure at Columbia as the founding director of the Jerome L. and Dawn Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory from 2002 to 2007, which transitioned to the John Snow Professorship he holds at present.A physician-scientist, Lipkin is internationally recognized for his work with West Nile virus and SARS, as well as advancing pathogen discovery techniques by developing a staged strategy using techniques pioneered in his lab. These molecular biological methods, including MassTag-PCR, the GreeneChip diagnostic, and High Throughput Sequencing, are a major step towards identifying and studying new viral pathogens that emerge locally throughout the globe. A major node in a global network of investigators working to address the challenges of pathogen surveillance and discovery, Lipkin has trained internationally over 30 scientists in these state-of-the art diagnostic techniques.
Lipkin earned the reputation of a "master virus hunter" due to his speed and innovative methods of identifying new viruses, and has been lauded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. As director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health; Lipkin, from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, has led CII researchers collaborating with researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in China. Dr. Lipkin had also advised the Chinese government and the World Health Organization during the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak. Dr. Lipkin described his own infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, beginning mid-March 2020, which resulted in a case of COVID-19 and necessitated his recovering from the illness at home, on the podcast This Week in Virology.
Lipkin is the director for the Center for Research in Diagnostics and Discovery, under the National Institutes of Health Centers of Excellence for Translational Research program. The Center for Research brings together leading investigators in microbial and human genetics, engineering, microbial ecology and public health to develop insights into mechanisms of disease and methods for detecting infectious agents, characterizing microflora and identifying biomarkers that can be used to guide clinical management. Lipkin was previously the Director of the Northeast Biodefense Center, the Regional Center of Excellence in Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases which comprised 28 private and public academic and public health institutions in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Within this consortium, his research focused on pathogen discovery, using unexplained hemorrhagic fever, febrile illness, encephalitis, and meningoencephalitis as targets. He is the Principal Investigator of the Autism Birth Cohort, a unique international program that investigates the epidemiology and basis of neurodevelopmental disorders through analyses of a prospective birth cohort of 100,000 children and their parents. The ABC is examining gene-environment-timing interactions, biomarkers and the trajectory of normal development and disease. Lipkin also directs the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Diagnostics in Zoonotic and Emerging Infectious Diseases, the only academic center, and one of two in the US, that participates in outbreak investigation for the WHO.
Lipkin was co-chair of CDC Steering Committee of the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee. The NBAS was established in response to Homeland Security Presidential Directive 21, "Public Health and Medical Preparedness."
He is Honorary Director of the Beijing Infectious Disease Center, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institut Pasteur de Shanghai and serves on boards of the Australian Biosecurity Cooperative Research Centre for Emerging Infectious Disease, the Guangzhou Institute for Biomedicine and Health, the EcoHealth Alliance, Tetragenetics, and 454 Life Sciences Corporation.
Research
Bornavirus
In 1989, Lipkin was the first to identify a microbe using purely molecular tools. During his time as chair at UC Irvine, Lipkin published several papers throughout the decade dissecting and interpreting bornavirus. Once it was apparent the viral infections could selectively alter behavior and steady state brain levels of neurotransmitter mRNAs, the next step was to look for infectious agents which could be used as probes to map anatomic and functional domains in the central nervous system.By the mid-1990s, it was asserted that "Borna disease is a neurotropic negative-strand RNA virus that infects a wide range of vertebrate hosts," causing "an immune-mediated syndrome resulting in disturbances in movement and behavior." This led to several groups across the globe working to determine if there was a link between Borna disease virus or a related agent and human neuropsychiatric disease. The group was formally called Microbiology and Immunology of Neuropsychiatric Disorders and the multicenter, multi-national group focused on using standardized methods for clinical diagnosis and blinded laboratory assessment of BDV infection. After nearly two decades of inquiry, the first blinded case-controlled study of the link between BDV and psychiatric illness was completed by the researchers at Columbia University's Center for Infection and Immunity in a joint effort that concluded there is no association between the two. Lipkin noted that "it was concern over the potential role of BDV in mental illness and the inability to identify it using classical techniques that led us to develop molecular methods for pathogen discovery. Ultimately these new techniques enabled us to refute a role for BDV in human disease. But the fact remains that we gained strategies for the discovery of hundreds of other pathogens that have important implications for medicine, agriculture, and environmental health."