Hello, I’m Dr. Jeff Kingsley and welcome to another edition of Riding in Cars With Researchers. I was at the DIA conference in San Diego this year with a bunch of my colleagues. For those of you who don’t know, DIA is a massive, clinical research conference with thousands of attendees. We were sitting around talking after a long day and one of my colleagues asked me how did I do this? How did I get involved in research? How did I end up giving up my traditional medical career? How did it happen? I told the story and there were a lot of “wows” and “why haven’t you told this story online? People need to hear this story.” So that’s what I’m going to do now. I will tell the story of how I got into clinical research.

My Background as a Physician

I’m a family physician by training and I had witnessed some physicians doing clinical research when I was going through my family medicine training. Actually, I had participated in some pre-clinical research when I was in med school, but in residency training there were some influential physicians who I saw doing clinical research and it at least opened the door for me.

I had a regular medical practice, I was still delivering babies, doing obstetrics, I was making nursing home rounds, and seeing regular family medicine patients. I was faculty in a residency program, so I was teaching young physicians how to become good family medical physicians. I became medical director of the Family Medicine Department and then became medical director of an urgent care center. I didn’t have a lot of free time. I was also married with four kids. One day I was finished seeing patients and I was sitting in the physician’s lounge at the end of the day with a good friend of mine, Dr. Joe Surber. We were relaxing, having some coffee before heading home and Joe said, “what do you think about starting a clinical research company? Just something to do nights and weekends.”

My Interest is Piqued

And that was the end of the conversation. Just a quick little conversation, but it stuck with me. And so I began doing a little bit of research on research. How much research is going on in the world, what’s it like, how much research is going on in the city that I’m in? And I intrigued and I thought, you know what, this would be fun because it’d be a great way to give free healthcare to the community. We don’t need insurance, there’s no copays, there’s no nothing. All we have to do is do enough research that it pays the bills and supports an ability to give free healthcare to the community. Two weeks later I grabbed Joe, threw him in the car and we met up with some real estate agents. We leased 900 square feet: little tiny facility, two exam rooms, two offices, a reception area, and a bathroom. And we were off and running.

My First Trial

Two months later we convinced the first company to give us a research trial and it was a hard research trial. It was a Phase II randomized, double blind, intravenous antibiotic trial twice daily dosing. The investigational medication was a different color from the comparative drug. It required lots of extra staff. You had to have pharmacy staff for mixing. You had to be able to maintain the blind. You had to cover the IV bags, you had to cover the tubing. Somebody separate had to be able to hook things up so that you couldn’t break the blind. Very complicated trial and you’ve got patients that are having to get their doses at 7:00 in the morning and 7:00 at night. The dose is taken every couple of hours and that made for very long days. That was our first trial out of the box and we knocked it out of the park.

For that trial, we ended up being the 9th highest enrolling site in the world. I think we were maybe 2nd in the United States. We had patients all over the place. We were out of space in our facility. We had patients sitting in chairs in my personal office, getting their IV infusions, because we had no further space. And I was having a blast. I was having so much fun. Remember, I still had a medical practice. So how did that work? Well, I was seeing patients in my medical practice and my research practice was on the other side of town. I would get a call from my research practice that there was a patient that could screen for the trial. I would finish up with a patient in my medical practice and would say to my nurse, I’ll be right back. I would casually walk out of my office, run across the parking lot, jump in my car, drive across the city, run across the parking lot and run into my office, casually walk into the exam room and talk to a patient about the research trial. If the patient consented, we would begin all the screening activities. I would casually walk out of the office, run across the parking lot, jump in my car, drive across the city, run across the parking lot, walk into my office, and walk into the next exam room. All as if nothing had happened. I did that for six months