CLINICAL MATTERS

Each year, Oct. 27 is designated as National Mentoring Day in celebration of the importance of mentors in our lives. As an infectious diseases doctor, I’ve had many excellent role models and mentors who have shaped me as the physician and scientist I am today. This is especially poignant because I just attended IDWeek 2024 last Oct. 15 to 19. IDWeek is an international infectious diseases convention held this year in Los Angeles jointly by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Society of Healthcare Epidemiology in America, the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, the HIV Medical Association, and the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists. I go to IDWeek every year for an excellent educational experience, and I also reconnect with many of my colleagues, former professors, and mentors. I was reminded once again of how important so many people have been to my career. Among the delegates to this year’s conference are some of my own mentees, doctors whom I have helped shape and am continuing to guide in their careers.

The most prestigious named lecture in IDWeek is the Maxwell Finland Lecture. Dr. Finland was a world-renowned, pioneering infectious diseases doctor who helped define the field and did seminal work on antibiotics and bacterial pneumonia. I was pretty excited because this year’s designated lecturer happens to be a mentor and good friend of mine. Dr. Robert Bonomo was my professor at the University Hospitals of Cleveland and the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, US when I was training in infectious diseases from 2005 to 2008. He is a world leader in studying antimicrobial resistance and in developing life-saving novel treatments for highly resistant bacteria. His lecture was a tour-de-force of his life’s work, from figuring out the complex molecular interactions of antibiotics with bacterial resistance enzymes, to the lives that were saved when these theories were applied to patients who otherwise would have had no good options for curing their infections. He also mentioned his colleagues and mentees who were with him along the journey and whose own research careers have since blossomed and enriched our scientific knowledge.

Dr. Bonomo dedicated his lecture to Dr. Robert Salata, another dear mentor of mine, who had unexpectedly passed away last August. Dr. Salata was one of the most brilliant doctors I had ever worked with and was the chief of medicine at Case Western at the time of his passing. He was chief of infectious diseases when I was an infectious diseases fellow, and he took me under his wing by giving me opportunities to write articles with him in many important publications and textbooks. Two of those textbooks, Nelson’s Pediatrics and Cecil’s Medicine, are used by medical practitioners all over the world and I have been fortunate to have updated those chapters with him multiple times. I last saw him in 2022 when I visited Cleveland and he asked me to talk about our Covid-19 experience in the Philippines at their medicine grand rounds. Dr. Salata generously visited the Philippines twice on my invitation to give lectures and teach our fellows and explore collaborations. I miss him a lot.

Aside from his academic prowess, Dr. Bonomo has mentored countless physicians such as myself and has helped us become better doctors. We invited Dr. Bonomo to the Philippines in 2022 to speak at the Philippine College of Physicians convention, and his lectures were very enlightening. We reconnected during that time and he told me that he wanted to collaborate with me in doing antimicrobial resistance research. When I was a fellow, Dr. Bonomo had generously offered to help me with my research career. Unfortunately, I was more interested in pursuing tropical medicine rather than bacterial resistance, so we were not able to work together. 

When I returned home, our HIV epidemic was growing so I shifted gears to HIV and asked for help from another mentor from Cleveland, Dr. Michael Lederman who came to the Philippines in 2010 and helped guide our response. This time, he was determined that we work together since antimicrobial resistance had become a huge problem in the Philippines. Before I knew it, he had persuaded me to write a grant to study carbapenem (a type of very strong antibiotic)-resistance at the Philippine General Hospital and I recruited one of our infectious diseases fellows, Dr. Jonnel (Jow) Poblete, to help run the study. Dr. Bonomo also enlisted the help of another world-renowned colleague who lived in Singapore, Dr. David Paterson and he insisted on meeting online almost every week to encourage us to keep going. Since Dr. Bonomo, with everything else on his plate was investing his precious time with me, I knew I had to honor that wonderful gift and we finished the study in record time. 

The results of the study have important implications for the way we treat antibiotic-resistant infections in the Philippines, and we wrote it up for presentation to IDWeek along with Dr. Bonomo, Dr. Paterson, and Dr. Federico Perez. Federico was a co-fellow of mine when I was studying in Cleveland and he is Dr. Bonomo’s protégé. Federico is a rising star in his own right with his pioneering in the treatment of carbapenem-resistant infections. With such luminaries working with us, the abstract was accepted for poster presentation. This enabled Jow to attend IDWeek and present our work. As a bonus, Dr. Bonomo and Federico offered to show him their laboratory in Cleveland and he is currently there learning state-of-the-art antimicrobial resistance research. I feel like this is going full circle because my mentors are also teaching my mentees.

I’m finishing this write-up on the plane ride home, and I cannot help but feel blessed to have met all the extraordinary men and women who have guided my work and generously shared their time and expertise to make me a better doctor, scientist, and person. As Dr. Bonomo said in closing his lecture, the best way to pay them back is to pay it forward. And I like to think that I am doing that with all the promising infectious diseases physicians I have taught and mentored, who are now excellent doctors and scientists, and some of whom now have their own mentees. There is nothing more rewarding for a mentor than to see his academic children grow and become mentors to the next generation.