In August, we shared with you a video made in 2009 highlighting the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. Where are those program alumni now, ten years later? How has the program and the support from the Alliance helped shape their careers? We reached out to each of the alumni interviewed in the original (somewhat fuzzy by today’s standards) video to share with you their continuing stories, starting with Kristina Cook.
Kristina Cook completed her DPhil in 2009 in Christopher Schofield’s lab (Oxford) and William (Doug) Figg’s lab (NIH/NCI). Her thesis focused on inhibiting an oxygen sensing pathway to develop novel anti-cancer drugs. Low-oxygen (hypoxic) environments are a universal hallmark of all solid cancers. Cancer cells exploit this environment to activate a transcription factor known as hypoxia inducible factor or HIF, which increases metastasis and chemotherapy resistance. Kristina’s collaborative DPhil project identified a new mechanism for inhibiting HIF and set up a high throughput screen at the NIH to identify a number of new HIF inhibitors.
During Kristina’s time in Oxford, she met her partner and now husband, who is Australian. When she finished her DPhil, Kristina moved to Sydney and took up a post-doc in a new area of research studying post-translational modifications of proteins.
Kristina explained: “I enjoyed the work and developed new skills, but ultimately my love of hypoxia came calling. I was lucky to secure fellowships and started my own lab in this area in 2017. In addition to continuing the work on tumor hypoxia and HIF inhibitors, my lab has an interesting project on obstructive sleep apnea (hypoxia!) and cancer. We’ve also started an exciting project on circadian rhythms and hypoxia. My nerdy side was really excited to see two Science papers come out this year on a new oxygen sensing pathway independent of HIF and we have started work in this area as well.”
“I absolutely loved my time in the NIH OxCam program. Studying alongside some the world’s greatest researchers at renowned institutions is hard to beat, but the NIH OxCam program is so much more than that. One unique aspect of the program was the leadership and mentoring components. Top-notch science isn’t the only important quality for running a lab, and skills in leadership, mentoring and team-building are equally important. The NIH OxCam program had a strong focus on developing these qualities and they have served me well as I build my team. It is fantastic that the NIH OxCam program prepares their students to be future leaders and mentors. When we build strong teams in a supportive environment, we have the best chance at making ground-breaking discoveries and changing clinical outcomes. I made many lifelong friends in the OxCam program and these friendships were essential to getting through graduate school. We still like to catch up through Skype today.”
Kristina lives in beautiful Sydney, Australia. Kristina, her husband, and their four-year-old son love going to the beach and spend every weekend there in the summer (making us all jealous as Australia’s summer is during our winter). They love to travel as a family and have been to many places including Vietnam, Thailand, Hawaii, Mexico, and the U.S.
Since 1945, the Lasker Foundation has highlighted how basic biological discoveries drive innovative clinical therapies and techniques and how science stokes our curiosity about the intricate and often beautiful processes that underlie all life forms.
Over the course of their seven decades, the Lasker Awards have come to be known as “America’s Nobels,” in part because of their standing as America’s most prestigious biomedical research awards, and in part because those selected so often go on to win the Nobel Prize. Eighty-eight Lasker laureates have received the Nobel Prize, including 41 in the last three decades. Today, that number has increased by three.
The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly awarded William G. Kaelin Jr, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza “for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability” today. They identified molecular machinery that regulates the activity of genes in response to varying levels of oxygen.
In 2016, the NIH Oxford-Cambridge/Wellcome Trust (WT) scholars had the opportunity to attend the Lasker Awards which honored these three physician-scientists for their discovery of the pathway by which cells from human and most animals sense and adapt to changes in oxygen availability, a process that is essential for survival. Alumni David Bulger, Joanna Cross, Alexander Weiss, Andrew Breglio, Keval Patel and Huayu Ding conversed with the 2019 Nobel Laureates, along with Ralf F. W. Bartenschlager, Charles M. Rice, Michael J. Sofia, and Bruce M. Alberts who all received the 2016 Lasker Awards.
The Alliance congratulates William G. Kaelin Jr., Sir Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza, as well as, all of the winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize.
The Dr. Richard and Vera Siegel Translational Award was generously endowed by NIH MD/PhD Partnership Program Co-Founder, Dr. Richard Siegel and his wife, Vera. First awarded in 2016, this annual award recognizes advances in the field of medical science that move fundamental discoveries from the bench to the bedside. The recipient of the Translational Award for 2019 was NIH-Cambridge Scholar Zinan Zhang. Zinan is an OxCam Class of 2017 Scholar and MD/PhD student at the Harvard Medical School. He is mentored by Dr. Michael Lenardo of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Prof. Ken Smith of the Cambridge Department of Medicine.
Zinan coordinated a multinational collaboration between the United Kingdom, the United States, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, and France to collect a group of pediatric patients that all have a novel genetic disease that he discovered involving the deficiency of the IL-2 receptor beta (IL2RB) chain. In addition to defining this new disease and demonstrating the molecular mechanism of defective IL-2 signaling in different patients, he developed novel insights into receptor function in different immune cell subsets. He was able to show how three different IL2RB mutations can cause IL2RB deficiency by three distinct mechanisms. Interestingly, one hypomorphic IL2RB mutation differentially affected T cells and Natural Killer cell subsets. In addition, lentiviral gene transfer was able to rescue the disease phenotype in patient cells.
Zinan’s work has opened a new area for translational research for this primary immunodeficiency disease. To learn more about his research and findings, he recently published a first-author publication in The Journal of Experimental Medicine.
We congratulate Zinan on both his accolades, as he was also awarded the Best Talk at the Annual Workshop and wish him continued success in his doctoral career.
First awarded in 2016 and sponsored annually by the Board of Directors of the International Biomedical Research Alliance, the Innovation Award recognizes novel solutions in biology or medicine and is presented for discovers of unusual importance, application, or magnitude that make use of new or unusual methods, paradigms or approaches to solve important problems in biology or medicine. This year, the Innovation Award was presented to NIH-Cambridge Scholar, and El-Hibri Biomedical Research Scholar, Michael Fernandopulle. Michael is a Class of 2016 scholar pursuing a MD/PhD (MD in progress) at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. His mentors are Dr. Michael Ward, of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and Dr. Peter St George-Hyslop of the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Cambridge.
Michael discovered that Annexin A11, a protein implicated in familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), enables long-range transport of RNA molecules in neuronal axons. Annexin A11 serves to tether RNA, which exists in the cell within “liquid droplets” of protein, to lysosomes, which are organelles that move bidirectionally along neuronal processes. This discovery illuminated a previously uncharacterized process that is critical for the long-term survival and maintenance of neurons, and that appears to be disrupted in neurodegenerative diseases. Michael’s study is also the first description of a protein that can function as a tether between “membraneless” liquid droplets and a membranous organelle.
Michael is currently investigating the biophysical regulation of Annexin A11 function. He is broadly interested in how metabolic regulation and membrane trafficking influence neuronal cell biology. After medical school, Michael plans to pursue a neurology residency on his way to establishing an independent research group.
We wish Michael continued success in his research and doctoral career!
The Gregory Paul Lenardo Basic Science Award was graciously endowed by NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program Co-Founder, Dr. Michael Lenardo, in loving memory of his brother. First awarded in 2016, this annual award recognizes discoveries of fundamental cellular, molecular, or genetic processes using model systems that advance scientific understanding of biological processes in higher organisms. This year at the Annual Workshop, the recipient of the Gregory Paul Lenardo Basic Science Award was NIH-Cambridge and MarshallScholarNicholas Ader. Nick is a Class of 2015 scholar, mentored by Dr. Richard Youle of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and Dr. Wanda Kukulski of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge.
Nick implemented novel imaging techniques in an effort to better understand how a cell dies. When a cell is no longer needed, it is programed to self-destruct via a process known as apoptosis. Nick’s work to push the limits of cellular imaging has not only provided striking views of this process, but has led to a better understanding of how apoptosis occurs. In their paper published in the scientific journal, eLife, Nick and his mentors describe how the imaging data they collected suggests a new model for how the proteins involved in apoptosis reorganize mitochondrial membranes to set the process of cell death in motion.
Nick successfully defended his thesis in June. In September, he will begin a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Patrick Lusk and Megan King in the Department of Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine. There, he will continue to address basic questions in cell biology by investigating how the compartment that contains a cell’s DNA, the nuclear envelope, is maintained and how this maintenance may fail during cancer.
We wish Dr. Ader continued success and look forward to his accomplishments in the future.
