Member Spotlight: Mark Schleiss

Mark R. Schleiss, MD, is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School in the Division of Infectious Diseases, where he is the American Legion and Auxiliary Heart Research Foundation Endowed Chair. He received his medical degree from Oregon Health and Sciences University. Dr. Schleiss completed his residency at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital and completed his pediatric infectious diseases fellowship at Seattle Children’s Hospital/University of Washington Department of Pediatrics. He also received training in molecular medicine at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington.

Dr. Schleiss joined PIDS in 1993 as a member of the “inaugural class” of practitioners certified in pediatric infectious diseases by the American Board of Pediatrics. He has served PIDS through several roles, including the Program and Meetings Committee, donating to the PIDS Foundation, and as a PAS program committee member where he engaged in coordination of ID programming for the annual PAS meeting in collaboration with PIDS representatives.

Why Pediatric ID? I first became interested in infectious diseases when I read “The Story of Louis Pasteur,” which I checked out of my school library in fourth grade. That year, my parents got me a microscope for Christmas, and I never looked back. I majored in microbiology as an undergraduate, and although I knew I wanted to be a pediatrician early in my medical school training, I knew I would come back to infectious diseases, so it was a natural evolution for me to become a pediatric infectious diseases physician. I love talking to families, tackling a challenging differential diagnosis, and thinking of new experiments to do in my lab – so I really have the best job in the world!

Where have you taken your ID focus? Recently, I have dedicated a large component of my work to improving recognition and care of children with congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection. Working in the public advocacy arena and engaging in efforts to establish universal newborn screening for this infection, it took six years, but we got a bill passed by the Minnesota legislature that enabled universal screening in our state. It’s been an amazing journey! I was very excited when we made Minnesota the first state to perform universal congenital CMV screening. It was the families that deserve the real credit – they were the driving force behind the legislation (known as the “Vivian Act”) that got us to the finish line! They showed amazing tenacity, perseverance, patience and commitment. Now that we have it in place, I hope we can carry the momentum to other states in the country and take advantage of this opportunity to study its natural history, pathogenesis, and biomarkers that help us gain a better understanding of outcomes for these children. 

What is a recent development in peds ID you are working on? My laboratory continues to work on improving the methodology for newborn screening of the dried blood spot used for congenital CMV testing. Although universal screening in Minnesota was a victory for advocacy in the public policy arena, work done in parallel by my laboratory team who, in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control, showed that improvements in DNA extraction from the newborn dried blood spot resulted in a substantially enhanced level of sensitivity. This was really necessary to make newborn congenital CMV screening possible, since screening assays must be highly sensitive before they can be implemented in clinical practice. There is still room for improvement in analysis of the dried blood spot, but we showed that the level of sensitivity was sufficiently robust to make universal screening tenable. This work in my laboratory complemented the public policy and advocacy work perfectly, making the implementation of the Vivian Act feasible.

Now, I’m interested in studying sequelae risk – are their biomarkers that might help us understand which asymptomatic infants are at increased risk of sequelae, such as sensorineural hearing loss? In addition, my lab continues to study preconception CMV vaccines, in our guinea pig model of congenital infection, to try to define the optimal correlates of protection against vertical transmission. These data, in turn, can help inform and direct future human vaccine trials.

What do you enjoy most about being a PIDS member? What keeps you renewing your membership? I enjoy the opportunity for collaboration and interaction with colleagues that comes with PIDS membership. It is particularly gratifying to mentor trainees in infectious diseases and PIDS provides a great forum for mentorship. I am incredibly thankful for PIDS grant support that over the years of my membership in the Society has facilitated my mentorship of fellows (St. Jude-PIDS Fellowship Award in Basic and Translational Science), junior faculty (Feigin Apprenticeship Award) and both pre-medical and medical students (SUMMERS Research Scholar Award).

More recently, I’ve mentored another ID fellow (now a faculty member) who has received a K award from NIH to study CMV-HIV interactions; a K-funded assistant professor in developmental/behavioral pediatrics studying congenital CMV outcomes and sequelae; and a post-doc who received a fundable score on a K grant application to study unique biomarkers associated with CMV in breast milk. As the late Thomas Weller famously noted, CMV is a “ubiquitous agent with protean clinical manifestations.” The study of CMV spans the full breadth and scope of all of pediatric practice. It has been a true privilege to be a part of the collaborative and supportive environment that is so fundamental to PIDS membership.