Member Spotlight: Wenliang Song, MD, MS, MTR

Wenliang Song, MD, is a third-year internal medicine resident at Bridgeport Hospital of Yale University. He has been a very active young member of the National Lipid Association (NLA). He is on the NELA Membership Committee and the Early Career Development Committee. Dr. Song recently took the initiative to promote awareness of the NLA through a “bottom up” strategy. He introduced the NLA to his residency program and received an extraordinary response. Inspired by that, he built an email database of program directors and coordinators from internal medicine residencies and endocrinology and cardiology fellowship programs of NELA. On behalf of NELA and the Early Career Development Committee, he sent trainees information on NLA activities and various resources available to them. This enabled enrollment of many trainees at the 2015 Fall Lipid Academy in Pittsburgh, Pa. He has been working to replicate that success at the national level and is now actively involved in activities of the national Early Career Development Committee.

Dr. Song has an atypical professional path. He was born, raised, and educated in China. He followed the footsteps of his two elder brothers — both renowned biomedical researchers — to the U.S., and has long decided to commit himself to a career in academic medicine. After graduating from Shandong University Medical School in China, he joined Garret A. FitzGerald, MD’s, group at the University of Pennsylvania as a postdoctoral fellow. Dr. FitzGerald’s group is one of the leading programs in cardiovascular (Penn) research in the world, where basic and clinical research are intertwined and where trainees and other researchers are encouraged to take a translational approach to address questions of clinical relevance. His training experience in the FitzGerald lab was broad — he performed basic lab research in cardiovascular medicine for a number of years, followed by patient-oriented translational research training through a NIH KL2 physician scientist master degree program. He participated in several general and clinical research center-sponsored clinical studies; some of which he designed and served as the principal investigator. He obtained extramural funding from national organizations, such as the American Heart Association (AHA) as a principal investigator, and authored numerous manuscripts in high-impact journals.

His work on niacin, supported by an AHA award, was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. In that article, he elucidated the potential cardiovascular hazard attendant to blockade of the DP1 receptor. That highlighted questions of drug safety and effectiveness of the combination of niacin and DP1 antagonist laropiprant in a large scale outcome trial HPS2-THRIVE. His article suggested that laropiprant might have compromised niacin’s cardiovascular benefits, which led to the negative result of HPS2. Notably, his article was published in 2012, a year before the HPS2 study was concluded.

For his research accomplishments, he was promoted to a research assistant professor position at Penn. While he had the option to continue on a successful research career path, his aspiration of becoming a physician-scientist led him to the decision to refresh and expand his clinical skills through a formal U.S. residency. This decision was enthusiastically supported by Drs. Daniel Rader and Muredach Reilly who had acted as inspirational co-mentors for Dr. Song at Penn. Dr. Song developed great interests in clinical lipidology through his work on niacin and from his interaction and collaborations with Drs. Rader and Reilly. He is in the process of getting NLA lipidology board certification.

Dr. Song is excelling in his last year of residency at Bridgeport Hospital of Yale University. Between his busy clinical responsibilities as a resident, Dr. Song has continued to engage in academic research actively during residency and has generated interesting data on the effect of HDL on platelet function with John Hwa, MD, PhD, at Yale. Based on these results, he submitted a grant application to AHA, which is in revision after very encouraging initial reviews. Dr. Song has matched to and looks forward to starting a cardiology fellowship in July 2016 at Vanderbilt University, where Dr. MacRae Linton is leading a large NIH PPG grant on HDL. He is very excited to join Dr. Linton’s research team on these studies. His ultimate career goal is to become a physician-scientist with a focus on basic research in lipid disorders. Dr. Song’s other professional accomplishments and awards include: a New Investigator Award from the Council on Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, a travel award from a Keystone Symposium, a resident research grant from Bridgeport Hospital Foundation, the co-inventor of two novel lipid biomarker patent applications, and editorial board membership with several scientific journals.

Dr. Song is happily married to his wife Dr. Weiping Li, whom he met in medical school. They have two lovely young children, Kevin and Charles, aged 5 and 1. In his spare time, Dr. Song enjoys cooking authentic Chinese food. He would have pursued a career as a chef if not a physician.