The 2022 awardees (listed in alphabetical order)

Awardee Profiles

Rebecca Allan, PhD Candidate 

Supervisors: Drs. Patrick Gunning & Leonardo Salmena 

“Novel Allosteric First in Class DNAJ-PRKACA Inhibitors for the Treatment of Fibrolamellar Hepatocellular Carcinoma” 

1. What excites you about your research project? ​

   I am excited about my research project because I am able to make an impact to rare disease communities by identifying novel ligands that bind to fusion proteins. The scaffolds I identify can be pursued by further research teams and hopefully large pharma, to someday help create therapies for these terrible diseases. ​

2. What do you look forward to learning and achieving in the next year? ​

   I look forward to learning about how my ligands are perturbing oncogenic signaling pathways and leading to cell death. I also am excited to find out how the ligands affect cell metabolism.​

3. How does your project bring together different disciplines? ​

   The PRiME fellowship will allow for a collaboration between our Medicinal Chemistry lab, and the Salmena lab in the department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. The Salmena lab have experience in studying signaling pathways and cell metabolism and will provide unique insight to our drug discovery process. ​

4. How will the PRiME Fellowship benefit your training experience? ​

   As a medicinal chemist, I am looking forward to developing my skills in cell biology. I am excited to develop my understanding of the tools available to probe biology and study signaling pathway and metabolic perturbation.​

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Travis Douglas, PhD Candidate 

Supervisors: Drs. Leo Chou & Omar Khan 

“Spatially defined and decorated DNA nanoparticles to investigate macrophage polarization” 

1. What excites you about your research project? ​

   The exciting part of my research project is that I get to engineer various DNA nanoparticles to direct their uptake into immune cells for efficient cargo delivery to influence anti-tumoral phenotypes.​

2.  ​What do you look forward to learning and achieving in the next year? ​

   I look forward to learning about the immunological effects the nanoparticles exert on immune cells and how this can be leveraged to rationally design cancer vaccine candidates. In the next year I plan to produce a novel nanoparticle design as a platform immunotherapy delivery technology capable of potently re-polarizing tumor macrophages.​

3.  How does your project bring together different disciplines?​

   This project uses DNA as a structural building material to engineer DNA nanostructures with precise control over spatial patterning of co-packaged targeting ligands and RNA payloads to investigate immune cell activation. The project brings together disciplines in DNA nanotechnology, RNA therapeutics, and cancer immunology.​

4.  ​How will the PRiME Fellowship benefit your training experience?​

   The PRiME Fellowship will benefit my training experience as I receive guidance from my primary supervisor, Dr. Leo Chou, along with collaborative input from Dr. Omar Khan’s expertise. PRiME offers an excellent trainee program focused on precision medicine innovations, supplemented with key insights into commercializing our technology.​

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Yechen Hu, Postdoctorate Fellow 

Supervisors: Drs. Aaron Wheeler & Penney Gilbert 

“Multi-Omics Analysis of Muscle Stem Cell Induced Muscle Disease” 

1. What excites you about your research project? ​

   The most exciting part is working with multidiscipline researchers to discover multi-omics differences between normal and abnormal muscle stem cells, which may eventually help elucidate the mechanism of muscle related diseases.​

2. ​What do you look forward to learning and achieving in the next year? ​

   I look forward to learning the transcriptome technologies and the digital microfluidic isolation of single cells for -omics (DISCO) system, and combining these methods with mass spectrometry for multi-omics analysis, and eventually try to reveal the function of certain proteins, post-translational modifications, and mRNAs in muscle-related pathological processes.​

3. ​How does your project bring together different disciplines? ​

   We build a multidiscipline team. My major is analytical chemistry, and my work focus on the mass spectrometry-based multi-omics. Prof. Wheeler is good at microfluidics and single-cell analysis, Prof. Gilbert is an expert in biomedical engineer and muscle biology. We will work together to use microfluidics coupled mass spectrometry to study muscle related diseases.​

4. How will the PRiME Fellowship benefit your training experience?​

   What the PRiME Fellowship benefit me most is having the chance to communicate and collaborate with other researchers in different disciplines.​

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Funing Lin, PhD Candidate 

Supervisors: Drs. Rob Batey & Walid Houry 

“Synthesis and characterization of biorelevant ADEP conjugates that target the human ClpP protease to develop novel anticancer therapeutics” 

1. What excites you about your research project? ​

   I love how versatile the lead compound in my research project is. With just one compound, we can attach different chemical functionalities that each have a unique and distinct purpose. To start, we’re generating analogues that will improving potency and selectivity, help us to visualize the movement of our compound in the cell and induce the selective degradation of proteins. The hope is to develop this technology so that it can make a real and lasting impact in the life of cancer patients.​

2. What do you look forward to learning and achieving in the next year? ​

   I hope to learn how to work in and be effective in such an interdisciplinary team. If you want to go fast, go alone but if you want to go far, then take others with you. Although there may be miscommunication, unvoiced expectations and various other hurdles along the way, I’m confident that I belong right in the middle of the disciplines because that’s where there will be significant advances to cancer therapeutics. ​

3. ​How does your project bring together different disciplines? ​

   My project brings together chemistry and biology in a streamlined manner. The project starts in the chemistry lab where I synthesize our lead compound that is primed for functionalization. From there, in one step, we can generate different conjugates with distinct purposes. Once all the chemistry is completed, I’ll be walking them over to the biology lab where I can test the activity and efficacy of our conjugates in a suite of suitable and biologically-relevant experiments. For example, we can test the compound not only on the protein level but also on a cellular level.​

4. ​How will the PRiME Fellowship benefit your training experience? ​

   The greatest benefit of being a PRIME fellow is to be in a community of like-minded scientists and thinkers who not only push me to be a better researcher but also pushes the boundary between the known and unknown. By giving me an opportunity to present my work, I can receive feedback that solidifies my research and also offer novel avenues to pursue that build on top of what I’ve already done. Furthermore, by hearing talks from other PRIME members, I can learn about science that is happening outside of my disciple and contextualize where my work sits in the greater scientific community. ​

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Dominic Owens, Postdoctorate Fellow 

Supervisors: Drs. Cheryl Arrowsmith & Gary Bader 

“Targeting nucleotide stress responses and ribosome biogenesis in cancer through inhibition of the CTLH complex” 

1. What excites you about your research project? ​

   Who wouldn’t be excited to be working with world-leading researchers on new potential cancer treatments?​

2. What do you look forward to learning and achieving in the next year? ​

   Over the next year I am looking forward to finding out whether our proposed treatment strategy works for killing skin cancer cells.​

3. How does your project bring together different disciplines? ​

   My project involves both wet lab work, under the supervision of Prof. Cheryl Arrowsmith, as well as computational analysis of the data under the supervision of Prof. Gary Bader.​

4. How will the PRiME Fellowship benefit your training experience? ​

   The PRiME Fellowship is an amazing opportunity to establish a new collaboration between two excellent research groups, meaning I get the best of both worlds!​

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Sarah Shawky, PhD Candidate 

Supervisors: Drs. Carolyn Cummins & Milica Radisic 

“Vasculature- and heart-on-a-chip platforms to investigate novel anti-atherosclerotic proteins secreted by liver X receptor (LXR)-modified endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs)” 

1. What excites you about your research project?​

   I think the most exciting thing about this project is the idea of modeling intricate cellular interactions in a 3D environment and leveraging this model to discover novel biomarkers or protein-based therapeutics for cardiovascular disease. ​

2. ​What do you look forward to learning and achieving in the next year? ​

   I have always been interested in working with organ-on-chip platforms to better-emulate the dynamic and multicellular human tissue environment, so I'm really looking forward to having the opportunity to do so in the context of cardiovascular disease. I'm especially looking forward to seeing whether we can identify a novel therapeutic protein that is beneficial against atherosclerosis! ​

3. ​How does your project bring together different disciplines? ​

   This project merges the disciplines of biology and engineering to model the progression of cardiovascular disease and identify and validate cardioprotective factors with potential for translation into novel therapies. We will be using the well-established vascular-on-a-chip platform developed by the Radisic Lab, InVADE, to screen the stem cell-derived athero-protective secretome generated in the Cummins Lab for therapeutic activity! ​

4. ​How will the PRiME Fellowship benefit your training experience? ​

   The PRiME Fellowship has been an invaluable opportunity to converge expertise from our two lab groups and facilitate exciting discovery. As a PRiME Trainee for the past two years, I've enjoyed learning from members across a multitude of disciplines whether it be engineering, pharmacy or medicine. Thank you to the PRiME Fellowship, I am very excited to be more involved with PRiME and accelerate our potential for discovery through a multidisciplinary approach!​

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Daniel Tabet, PhD Candidate 

Supervisors: Drs. Frederick Roth & Michael Garton 

“Modeling the LDL-LDLR interaction with comprehensive sequence-function data” 

1. What excites you about your research project?​

   I think it’s incredible that we are already seeing cases where proactive variant assessment is having an impact on patient diagnoses—getting a glimpse of these proof-of-principle applications is really motivating and we hope to soon see our experimental data at work in the clinic!​

2.  ​What do you look forward to learning and achieving in the next year? ​

   A common challenge in our field is interpreting fringe cases where our assessments differ from those in imperfect clinical databases, this has been a big driver behind our work with the Garton lab. If we can get to the bottom of these cases, we will have come a long way in answering some of our most pressing questions.​

3. ​How does your project bring together different disciplines?​

   To get the most out of our sequence–function studies we often look to apply independent methods that can answer the questions our data hint at; in working with Dr. Garton and his team we are using our functional data to inform the modeling of a protein–ligand interaction, bringing together two disciplines that are already well-suited to one another.​

4. How will the PRiME Fellowship benefit your training experience? ​

   I think it’s all too easy to get wrapped up in a narrow area of study, so being nudged out of that and getting to experience cutting-edge research from the many disciplines covered by the PRiME community is a unique experience for which I’m thankful!​

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Andrew Varley, Postdoctorate Fellow 

Supervisors: Drs. Bowen Li, Scott Gray-Owen & Jennifer Gommerman 

“A novel intranasal vaccine based on bivalent circular RNA for mucosal immunity against COVID-19” 

1. What excites you about your research project? ​

   I’m really excited to combine three different approaches to treat a serious need. In particular the next generation RNA technology, circular RNA, hold so much promise in the field and there are still few labs that have the capacity to effectively produce and purify it.​

2. ​What do you look forward to learning and achieving in the next year? ​

   Throughout the next year, I’ll be learning to perform many new immunological assays and hope to achieve higher immune protection stimulation in mice than previously reported!​

3. ​How does your project bring together different disciplines?​

   The project is an exciting combination of molecular biology, biomaterial design, immunology, and vaccinology. As a molecular biologist, I’ll be working alongside my supervisor, an expert in RNA delivery, and co-supervisors who are an immunologist and molecular geneticist in drug discovery. ​

4. ​How will the PRiME Fellowship benefit your training experience? ​

   Through the co-supervisors, I’ll not only have the advice and support to conduct the right experiments, but also the facilities to conduct advanced viral challenges. They’re the perfect combination of talent and knowledge to make such an ambitious project a reality.​

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