Daniel Leffler, MD, MS, AGAF, has some advice for young physicians starting out in their careers: Don’t be afraid of change.
“Just because you’re a doctor doesn’t mean you have to spend the rest of your career doing patient care. We don’t teach that in medical school as well as we should,” said Dr. Leffler. “If you’re interested in a skill set and move in a different direction, that’s totally okay. Many people have major career shifts, whether it’s early, mid- or late career.”
Dr. Daniel Leffler
Dr. Leffler followed his own advice in 2016 when he left his longtime job as an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and accepted a position with Takeda Pharmaceuticals. As its medical director, he had a specific goal: To find more therapeutic options for patients with celiac disease.
“Gastroenterology is a fantastic field of medicine, and it somehow continues to get more and more exciting,” said Dr. Leffler, who continues to see patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “There are just so many careers you can have within gastroenterology, whether you are a full-time endoscopist, in a teaching career, or doing lab work.”
He discussed the events that led to this career change in an interview with GI & Hepatology News.
Q: Why did you choose GI?
Dr. Leffler: I think for a lot of people GI is just an incredibly diverse field where you can see all types of patients and you have an unusually wide armamentarium of diagnostic and therapeutic options. Our ability to see inside in the GI tract relatively easily and obtain tissue and do functional studies is unique. It makes it a very dynamic field.
Q: What gives you the most joy in your day-to-day practice?
Dr. Leffler: I think it’s taking a fresh look at somebody whose symptoms have been incorrectly diagnosed or diagnosed preliminarily as one thing and opening different options and working with the patient to hopefully find a more targeted therapy based on a more definitive diagnosis.
Q: Describe your biggest practice-related challenge and what you are doing to address it.
Dr. Leffler: There are two challenges. For celiac disease, all I have is a gluten-free diet. It would be nice to have other options, the same way we do with almost every other GI disease, whether it’s acid-related disorders or chronic constipation or inflammatory bowel disease. We have a range of therapies we can pick and choose from, tailoring those to the individual. We are not there yet, unfortunately, in celiac disease, so that’s a huge challenge.
Another challenge is awareness of celiac disease. It’s not what it should be. We see a lot of patients who either were misdiagnosed or went many years without getting a proper diagnosis or got diagnosed and did not have proper education or follow up.
Q: How has your job changed since you first began your career? Perhaps we could discuss your switch from Harvard/Beth Israel Deaconess to Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
Dr. Leffler: I became convinced some years ago that the next big thing for celiac disease was an effective therapy beyond the gluten-free diet. Takeda had acquired rights to two of the therapies that I was most interested in, even though they were very early. There was a new glutenase, TAK-062, and a new immune-tolerizing molecule that became TAK-101. Takeda had moved its research center to Boston, and they were looking for someone to work on their celiac program. Moving from an academic position, which I loved, was a really difficult decision.
I didn’t leave without a conversation with the division chief at the time, Tom Lamont, MD. I basically said, “If this doesn’t work out, will you take me back?” I wasn’t sure how much I’d like working in industry. The other thing, on both sides, was that I was allowed to keep a clinic. I still see patients on Fridays and really, to me, I have the best of both worlds.
Q: What teacher or mentor had the greatest impact on you?
Dr. Leffler: I really think of Ciaran Kelly, MD at Beth Israel Deaconess, Detlef Schuppan, MD, who also was at Beth Israel Deaconess, but is now at the University of Mainz in Germany. And Peter Green, MD at Columbia University. These three are the physicians I’ve interacted with the most and learned the most from.
Q: What habits have you established that have benefited your career most?
Dr. Leffler: I do try to focus on being a good collaborator. Playing that long game of working for the good of the project and not necessarily what is next for you, has served me very well over the years.
Lightening round
Superpower?
Optimism
Favorite movie to quote?
The Big Lebowski
What is your favorite form of exercise?
Elliptical
Name one thing on your bucket list.
Ethiopia travel
How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?
Two-ish
Dr. Leffler is on LinkedIn.
