It happened in the blink of an eye.
As a student in UF’s Medical Honors Program
in the early 1980s, Mark Michels was looking for
a research project to focus on when he walked
across the hall to the lab of the late William Woodson
Dawson, MS, PhD, an electrophysiologist and longtime
faculty member in the UF College of Medicine department
of ophthalmology. Before he knew it, he became captivated
with the visual system and the thought of helping to restore
people’s vision.
“I found myself drifting back to that lab after rotations,”
Michels says. “I realized I liked ophthalmology more than
all the other possibilities. The retina is a beautiful thing. It’s a
reddish orange color. It looks cool under the microscope, the
pathology behind it is neat and the procedures are challenging.”
Although nearly 35 years have passed since Michels
roamed the halls of UF as a medical student and almost 300
miles now separate him from Gainesville, the South Florida
ophthalmologist maintains strong ties with his alma mater
through student mentoring and philanthropy, including
scholarship support. As the new president of the UF Medical
Alumni Board of Directors, Michels is also setting his sights
on helping to steer the college — and the next generation of
health care providers — into the future.
SHEDDING LIGHT ON RETINAL DISEASES
Since 1999, Michels has poured his passion for ophthalmology
into caring for patients at his practice, Retina Care
Specialists, which has expanded to include offices in Palm
Beach Gardens, Stuart and Port St. Lucie. He has also continued
to fuel his interest in leading-edge research — a love he
discovered in a corner of Dawson’s UF lab and carried to his
residency at Emory University School of Medicine — through
the scientific arm of his business, Retina Care Research Institute
of Florida Inc.
There, his 30-member team works on clinical trials that aim
to change the way physicians treat retinal diseases. In 2006,
his practice was part of the Lucentis Anchor trial, a national
project that resulted in a new treatment for age-related macular
degeneration. The paper Michels co-authored about it was
published in The New England Journal of Medicine and was
dubbed by Science magazine as the sixth most important article
in scientific literature that year.
“Now everyone uses Lucentis or an equivalent drug to treat
the three leading causes of blindness,” he says. “But the burden
is that it needs to be frequently injected into the eye.”
This led Michels and his team to their most recent project:
a clinical trial to test a device that, once implanted into the
eye, slowly releases the medicine and only needs to be refilled
every six to 12 months. If successful, this device would reduce
the burden for patients with wet macular degeneration, who
currently need injections on a monthly or bimonthly basis.
For Michels, who has been a principal investigator on over
30 national trials, the driving force is a deep-seated curiosity
“It’s an awesome
responsibility to take
care of people when
they are at their most
vulnerable.”
— MARK MICHELS, MD ’85
and a longing to impact lives. If eyes are the windows to the
soul, Michels intends to help keep that window open for his
patients as long as possible.
“The fun part about research is you never quite know where
it will take you,” Michels says. “You ask one question, and that
leads you to a bunch of new questions.”
ALL EYES ON THE NEXT GENERATION
For Michels, an important component of being a physician
is advocating for patients and educating the public and its
representatives on health care needs. As the legislative co-chair
of the Florida Society of Ophthalmology and a councilor to the
American Academy of Ophthalmology, he and his colleagues
bring residents to Washington, D.C., so they can learn firsthand
how to communicate with legislators about vital topics facing
patients. Although residents travel from various medical
schools across the state for these trips, in true Gator fashion,
Michels typically requests to mentor housestaff from UF.
“It’s an awesome responsibility to take care of people when
they are at their most vulnerable,” Michels says. “I tell trainees
that it’s critical to advocate for patients and to gain and
maintain their trust. It’s important for them to always do the
right thing, especially when nobody is looking.”
In addition to showing residents the ropes, Michels meets
with incoming medical students from South Florida each
summer before they make their way to Gainesville. As Legacy
Challenge members, he and his wife, Lyn, have also made a
gift to provide scholarships to two medical students.
“For me, staying connected to UF is about the privilege of
being able to pay it forward,” he says. “That’s an important part
of the culture of the college, and it’s refreshing to see that persist
in a world that’s not gentle and kind.
“Each time I visit Gainesville, I come home with 10 times
more energy than when I left,” Michels says. “Many people
before me provided financially, spiritually and academically, so
it’s important for me to give back in that way and hope the next
person will do the same.”
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