Despite the logistical challenges of a global pandemic, the Workshop Organizing Committee, comprised of current Scholars in the NIH Oxford-Cambridge/Wellcome Trust Program, worked diligently to plan the 2021 Annual NIH Global Doctoral Partnerships Research Workshop. This year the Workshop, entitled Celebrating Science: Looking Back and Looking Forward, was held virtually from July 13-15, 2021. Building around this theme, the Committee sought to unite Scholars, faculty mentors, program leadership, and invited speakers with a goal to enrich the training experience of the Scholars. The Workshop included keynote lectures and student oral presentations, elevator pitches, poster sessions, and long talks. To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program, the organizing committee invited keynote speakers, Scholar research presentations, elevator pitch competitions, poster sessions, and extended research talks. Additionally, they hosted a Founders Panel, along with Alumni reunion rooms for alumni and Scholars to connect. Members of the Board of Directors of the International Biomedical Research Alliance served among the faculty as moderators, judges, and elevator pitch team coaches throughout the Workshop.
Opening the 2021 Workshop, Workshop Organizing Committee Chair, and 2020 NIH Gates Cambridge M.D./Ph.D. Scholar Yasemin Cole welcomed the participants and introduced Professor Mihaela van der Schaar, Ph.D. as the Keynote Speaker (Looking Forward). Professor van der Schaar is the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Machine Learning, AI, and Medicine at the University of Cambridge. Her lecture “Moving Medicine from Art Towards Science Using ML” invited Scholars to engage in and co-develop Machine Learning tools. She shared how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have been essential in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. This included managing limiting resources, developing personalized and effective treatment courses for each patient, informing policies and improving collaboration, clinical trials, and managing uncertainty. Closing the lecture, Professor van der Schaar encouraged the audience to join Revolutionizing Healthcare, an ongoing series of engagement sessions for clinicians to tackle a wide variety of topics, including interpretability, personalized therapeutics, early diagnosis, and more.
Following Professor van der Schaar’s lecture, Alliance Chairman Stephen McLean served as the moderator of the NIH OxCam Founders Panel. The Workshop Organizing Committee invited the individuals essential to the development and evolution of the Scholars Program, including Dr. Michael Lenardo, Dr. Richard Siegel, Professor Gavin Screaton, Dr. Daniel Douek, and Professor Sir Keith Peters to celebrate the Program’s 20th Anniversary. Panelists shared their experiences from the early days of the Program’s inception and noted the challenges they faced. They credited the early Scholars who took a chance on a new and unique graduate program that paved the path for current and future Scholars. They shared their thoughts about how they saw the Program evolving moving forward.
The Class of 2018 Long Talks were broken up into three sessions, Students Room 1/Infectious Disease, Students, Room 2/Neurology & Cancer, and Students, and Room 3/Developmental Biology, Genetics, & Immunology. The Class of 2018 Outstanding Speaker Presentation Award was presented to Scholar NIH-Oxford Scholar Taylor Farley and the Outstanding Speaker Honorable Mention was presented to NIH-Cambridge Scholar Mehdi Seif Hamouda. After the 2018 Long Talks, Scholars in their final years led the OxCam Reflections Journey panel discussion. Panelists took questions from the audience and shared their experiences in the Program. Day one closed with a virtual showing of the documentary Picture A Scientist, a stirring personal account of brutal and subtle harassment as told by female researchers bravely sharing their own experiences. The film is meant to provide new enlightened perspectives on how to make science more diverse, equitable, and open to all
On day two of the Workshop, Organizing Committee Vice-Chair and 2020 NIH-Oxford M.D./Ph.D. Scholar Sahba Seddighi welcomed back attendees and introduced Keynote Speaker (Looking Back) Dr. Vivian Lee. Dr. Lee is the author of The Long Fix: Solving America’s Health Care Crisis with Strategies that Work for Everyone (Norton) and President of Health Platforms at Verily Life Sciences. A physician and health care executive, Dr. Lee also serves as a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School. In her talk entitled “Lessons from The Long Fix: Coproducing Health” Dr. Lee shared the importance of better data and analytics, partnerships between employers and health systems, and leveraging the emerging digital health space to transform consumers into “prosumers.”
Always a highlight of the Workshop, the Elevator Pitch Team Competition challenge is comprised of three teams, consisting of 6-7 first-year students and led by coaches consisting of an upperclassman Scholar, Alliance Director, and an OxCam Executive Committee faculty member. The teams are required to execute condensed research talks as part of the Class of 2020 Elevator Pitch Team Competition. The much-anticipated team competition yielded spirited research presentations, woven into creative formats, geared toward engaging the audience – all in an effort to hone science communication skills. The OxCam in Wonderland team stole the show and were named the 2021 Elevator Pitch Team winners. 2020 NIH-Oxford Scholar Hannah Dada and 2020 NIH-Cambridge Scholar Jacob Gordon were named the Class of 2020 Outstanding Speaker Presentation Award recipients.
The Class of 2019 presented posters with topics including cancer, neurodegeneration, cellular biology, genetics, physiology, and imaging. Class of 2019 Scholars uploaded their posters and interacted with attendees and judges at the Poster Hall. NIH-Cambridge Scholar Abigail Giles was named the Class of 2019 Outstanding Speaker Presentation Award recipient and NIH Gates Cambridge M.D./Ph.D. Scholar Stephen Gadomski was named the Outstanding Speaker Honorable Mention recipient.
NIH OxCam Alumna Dr. Bhooma Aravamuthan opened the Women in STEM discussion with her talk “Women in STEM – Data-based gaps and possible solutions” and was joined by fellow Alumni Drs. Adjoa Smalls-Mantey and Molly Perkins, along with, NIH Senior Investigator Dr. Judith Walters for a panel conversation.
Day 3 began with concurrent Alumni Panel Sessions and Alumni Reunion Rooms to connect Scholars and Alumni. The Academia/Physician-Scientist Panelists were Dr. Madhvi Venkatesh, Professor Elizabeth Brickley, Professor Aaron Alexander-Bloch, Dr. Madhav Sukumaran, and moderated by Alliance Director Dr. Kathy Zoon. The Government & Industry Panelists were Dr. Katie Warner, Dr. Tamara Litwin, and Dr. Tracy Yuen and moderated by Dr. Adam Knight. To conclude the Workshop, the Annual Research Awards Ceremony announced eight Alliance Sponsored Awards, along with, Outstanding Speaker Presentation Awards and Honorable Mentions for each class year (noted above in the order they appeared in the agenda), and the winning team for the Elevator Pitch Competition (also noted above). Details on the winners can be found in a separate article on this page.
To welcome the Class of 2021, the Workshop Organizing Committee stitched together a video of the new Scholars introducing themselves to the audience, opening with a Star Wars-themed presentation. Scholars were invited to participate in a Town Hall discussion and concluded with a Pub Quiz night.
Congratulations to Scholars Alex Waldman, Emily Kolyvas, Stewart Humble, and Stephen Gadomski for being named the 2021 Photo Contest Winners for their My Cool Science and/orMy OxCam Experience submissions. Please find these photos in the 2021 Alliance Journal, which can be found alongside the Program Agenda here.
The Board of Directors of the International Biomedical Alliance would like to acknowledge the following individuals and organizations whose steadfast support makes a meaningful difference for the next generation of scientists: Arsenal Capital Partners, AuerbachSchrot, LLC, BioHealth Innovation, Bluestreet Productions, Certara, Emergent BioSolutions, FAES, Institute for the Future of Medical Education, Lasker Foundation, MacroGenics, Michael Lenardo, M.D., National Institutes of Health, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Richard Siegel, M.D. and Vera Siegel, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford and WCG.
Did you notice the Alliance’s new homepage image? Are you curious about what this image depicts? Vicky graciously let us use her scanning electron microscope image showing SARS-CoV-2—also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes COVID-19—isolated from a patient in the U.S. (which is highlighted in the text below), emerging from the surface of cells cultured in her lab. We were excited to feature a new image that highlights one of our Scholars’ work, while also being extremely relevant to the times! For this Scholar update, we check in with NIH-Oxford MD/DPhil Scholar Victoria (Vicky) Avanzato to hear her story.
With students heading back to school across the country, science teachers have developed their curriculums to include lessons and experiments. Throughout the year, students will have the opportunity to create their own experiments and participate in science fairs. Science fairs challenge students to identify a question, develop a hypothesis to answer it, and then devise an experiment to test that idea. In principle, students who participate will not only learn about science but may be inspired to join the next generation of future leaders in biomedical research and medicine. This rang true for Vicky, who became interested in science at a young age through participating in science fair projects with her father. Vicky’s interest in science, specifically infectious diseases, developed during her studies at Pennsylvania State University. She doubled majored in Immunology and Infectious Disease, and Toxicology and participated in two summer internships, one at the Mayo Clinic working on oncolytic virotherapy against endometrial cancer, and another at the University of Texas Medical Branch, where she helped study the immune response to dengue virus. Through these internships, Vicky discovered her passion for virology and global health and decided to pursue her MD through Emory University School of Medicine, and her Ph.D. through the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. Vicky joined the laboratories of Dr. Vincent Munster at the NIH Rocky Mountain Laboratories and Prof. Thomas A. Bowden in the Division of Structural Biology at the University of Oxford, studying the immune response to the Nipah virus, a bat-borne virus infection. For this work, Vicky was awarded the Norman P. Salzman Memorial Graduate Student Award in Basic and Clinical Virology, as well as the Fellows Award for Research Excellence and NIH Women Scientists Advisors (WSA) Scholar Award.
At the University of Oxford, Vicky’s work focused on studying antibodies against the Nipah virus, a re-emerging virus that causes severe disease in humans. Using structural biology techniques, Vicky was able to determine where the antibodies bind the proteins on the virus, which allows the identification of vulnerable sites on the virus surface that can be targeted by the immune system. At the NIH, Vicky was also able to show that these antibodies were able to protect hamsters from getting sick with the Nipah virus, suggesting that the sites on the virus targeted by these antibodies make an attractive target for the development of vaccines and therapeutics. Her work on one of the antibodies, termed mAb66, is published in PNAS.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Vicky’s Oxford and NIH labs shifted to focus on the pandemic response. Vicky was able to produce SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and optimize the serology assays in the lab, which were critical to study the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination for animal studies and patients sample analysis. She also studied long-term SARS-CoV-2 shedding from an immunocompromised patient with cancer. The study, published in Cell, shows that the patient had a persistent COVID-19 infection and shed infectious virus for 70 days, and also displayed significant viral evolution over the course of the infection.
“The sudden shift in work was initially difficult for me – it was a big change from the initial Nipah work I was invested in and also a stressful time in general with a pandemic. However, I was able to apply my protein skills from my Oxford lab to my SARS-CoV-2 antibody studies at the NIH and I also learned many new skills in basic virology in a short amount of time. I hope to bring this ability to be flexible and adapt my skills to new research projects forward in my career as a physician-scientist,” remarked Vicky.
As her time in the program draws to a close, Vicky said she is grateful that she got to experience such diverse opportunities, both scientifically and personally, during her training. “I had such a broad training experience and learned a lot of scientific skills between my two labs. I was able to work on antibody structures, as well as participate in the pandemic response, which was really a unique way to spend graduate school. Outside of the lab, I also pursued my interests in music and hiking. At Oxford, I played the French horn and was the president of the Oxford Millennium Orchestra. I was able to play quite a few symphonies, including Mahler 1, and it was really a dream! My time at RML in Montana was like another world – I loved exploring the wilderness and hiking mountains on the weekends and taking little trips to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. My time in the Program really brought together the best of these very different places.”
After completing her Ph.D., Vicky plans to return to finish her medical degree at Emory University School of Medicine. She then hopes to complete a residency to become an infectious disease physician, while continuing to pursue her research interests in antibody responses to emerging viral infections and global health.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]NIH Oxford-Cambridge (OxCam) Alumna Erin Coonahan completed her DPhil research at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the University of Oxford, and the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in 2019. Her research, focused on the development of an aptamer-based sensor for the detection of antimalarial drugs, is now published in Science Translational Medicine. The sensor provided a rapid and affordable method for researchers in malaria endemic countries to collect data on antimalarial tablet quality and drug use practices – both major factors contributing to the emergence and spread of drug resistant malaria. Current standard methods to measure drug levels in antimalarial tablets and patient samples use liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) for specific small-molecule drug detection. Access to LC-MS equipment is limited in malaria endemic countries, usually necessitating shipment across country borders, making this data collection slow and often prohibitively expensive for local researchers. The aptamer sensor developed through Dr. Coonahan’s research in the OxCam Program allowed local malaria researchers to detect two of the most commonly used components of first line antimalarial treatments in Southeast Asia using only a fluorimeter. To develop this assay, Dr. Coonahan worked with malaria researchers at NIAID, chemistry and engineering labs at Oxford, an LC-MS laboratory at Oxford’s research site in Bangkok, and several smaller research laboratories in Western Thailand and Cambodia. The assay used low-cost aptamer technology to distinguish between similarly structured small molecules enabling local malaria researchers to study drug use in Southeast Asia, monitor implementation of mass drug administration campaigns, and detect falsified or substandard tablets. In the future, Dr. Connahan hopes to expand the number of detectable drugs and adapt the sensor output to a visual readout, eliminating the need for any lab equipment. “During my PhD, I learned new techniques and scientific approaches from various mentors and peers and I learned from new environments, working in different laboratories and cultures on 3 different continents. Upon completion of my PhD, I packed my car in my hometown in Maine and drove across the country to San Diego to begin medical school. I feel very lucky that my MD/PhD training has taken me across the world, and the country, and introduced me to wonderful people and lifelong friends,” stated Dr. Coonahan. Currently, Dr. Coonahan is starting her 3rd year of medical school at the UC San Diego School of Medicine via the OxCam Track 3 Program. This Program allows students to apply for medical school funding via the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) during their final years of doctoral research. The Program provides an important path for students, like Dr. Coonahan, who are motivated to pursue clinical training following their doctoral research experiences. She began graduate research with the goal of gaining technical skills in diagnostic and sensor development and along the way became aware of the many challenges at the intersection of technology and clinical solutions. Too often, a promising new technology in the medical field fails to be implemented due to unforeseen logistical barriers in the clinic or a lack of clinical need. In her future role as a physician-scientist, Dr. Coonahan hopes her training will allow her to leverage both clinical insight and sensor technology to identify, develop, and implement new diagnostic tools.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
What causes our bodies to age over time? One theory goes that it all begins at the cellular or even molecular level, where over time, damage to DNA in cells across the body accumulate and lead to mutation and cell senescence or death. In fact, it has been estimated that a single cell in the body can face up to hundreds of thousands of DNA lesions per day. Understanding where the DNA damage comes from, and how it is repaired, is key for improving our knowledge of how age-related diseases, including neurodegenerative disorders and cancer, originate.
“We were very surprised to find specific parts of the genome in neurons undergoing repeated DNA damage and repair. Previously, it was believed that damage occurred randomly across an individual cell’s DNA, but specifically in neurons we’ve now seen that there are special regions called enhancers that accumulate damage,” Will says. “These are very important regions of the genome that regulate how cells express their genes. It’s not hard to imagine how the damage we observe at these regions could, over time, lead to some of the effects of aging-related neurodegeneration.”
One key question remaining is where the DNA damage originates from. Will says the group believes it could be generated by the complicated process of turning on a gene, but future work will need to be done to clarify this. The collaborative study was supervised by Will’s mentor Dr. Andre Nussenzweig of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and Dr. Michael Ward of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), a fellow mentor of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program.
Will’s interest in the biological causes of aging began as summer research student in David Gius’ lab at Northwestern University. Dr. Gius, a former NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program Deputy Director, suggested Will consider the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program for graduate school. After graduating from Middlebury College in 2016, Will joined the Program and has spent time between the University of Oxford, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Aging. In addition to his work on DNA repair in neurons, Will has another recent co-first author paper in Nature on identifying the “Achilles’ heel” of a class of specific cancers. After defending his thesis this summer, Will is staying on as a postdoc with Dr. Nussenzweig at NCI.
Why does SARS-CoV-2 infection cause devastating illness in some while others have only mild symptoms? A study published in Science last year found that neutralizing autoantibodies against IFNa and/or IFNw are the cause of a significant proportion of life-threatening COVID-19 cases. The study found that 13.7% of patients with critical COVID-19 had autoantibodies against IFNa and/or IFNw, while these autoantibodies were only detected in 0.3% of healthy individuals (samples collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic).
“When identified early in the course of disease, detection of these autoantibodies could lead to novel therapeutic interventions, such as IFNb administration” said Lindsey Rosen, co-first author of the study. “We are hoping to screen samples collected from clinical trials where IFNb was used to treat COVID-19, some of which found a potential benefit of early IFNb administration. I hypothesize that some of the patients with positive outcomes have these autoantibodies and that exogenous IFNb helped them clear the virus more rapidly.”
Lindsey was recently recognized for her contributions to cytokine research as the first-place awardee of the 2020 William E. Paul Award. She will present her work and be recognized for her award at the upcoming NIH/FDA Cytokine Interest Group Mini Symposium on June 10, 2021, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm ET, on webex. Lindsey is currently finishing her doctoral research on autoimmunity at the University of Oxford and the National Institutes of Health as an NIH OxCam Scholar. After completing her DPhil, she plans to perform her postdoctoral research on anti-cytokine autoantibodies at the National Institutes of Health under the mentorship of Dr. Steve Holland.
