Aria Osborne, COL ’26, Fairfax, VA
When I initially received my job offer to work as a student researcher at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, I didn’t quite know what I was in for. I applied for the job seeing it as an opportunity to continue my wet lab work in cancer research, this time focusing it on studying immunotherapy in treatment of Multiple Myeloma. However, after a Zoom call where I met my future boss, a post-doctoral fellow and physician from Germany, I learned that he wouldn’t be able to teach me exactly what I set out to learn. Whereas I desired to be engrossed in pipetting, diluting, and running assays through flow cytometry and cell sequencing machines, my boss broke the news that he instead needed me to do clinical research and statistical analysis for him – both areas that in which, unlike the wet lab work that I had been doing for the past two years, I felt a little out of my depth. My role was to act in a hybrid position, working both in the clinical research and analysis setting, as well as learning and understanding the procedures of cell sequencing for patients treated with CAR-T cell therapy.
Day to day, I would annotate patients’ charts and follow along with my post-doc’s research projects, shadowing and assisting with his experiments. With meetings with him multiple times a week and attending weekly lab meetings, I recognized and embraced the challenge of understanding the ins and outs of the multi-step testing processes going on in the lab. By the end of my time researching at Dana Farber, I was able to pool all that I learned and the research I conducted there into my very own data analysis project on CAR-HEMATOTOX score efficacy in assessing myeloma patient’s hematotoxicity. Once completed, I presented my project to the lab and PI, and received exceptional feedback. My PI even asked me to continue pursuing my research on a new project she was starting.
As a whole, this experience taught me the beauty and possibility tied to stepping outside one’s comfort zone. Learning and eventually conducting clinical research gave the exposure to the world of medical diagnosis and cancer treatment: the intricacies of treatment plans, the necessity for constant monitoring and problem solving necessary for treating patients with myeloma, and in real-time the effect that our research on bone marrow microenvironments and spatial transcriptomics would be able to have on the outcomes of myeloma patients treated with CAR-T cells. It beckoned me to understand at the most fundamental to the most complex level the happenings of the research that was going on around me. Although I didn’t get to conduct the standard wet-lab work I was expecting, through the clinical research I was doing, delving into patients’ histories and running statistical analyses on their outcomes, and with the encouragement and constant challenging of my post-doc, I was able to see the efficacy of the outcomes of our study play out in patients’ experiences with CAR-T therapy. Understanding what was happening in each experiment and actively studying the progressions of patients whose samples were the experiments’ subjects garnered in me an enhanced value for the work we were conducting and has inspired me to continue pursuing research in CAR-T and immunotherapy.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2024 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
