Nina is one of the up-and-coming superstars in biotech. Having just earned her PhD in bioengineering at Stanford in the Sunwoo Lab this summer, she has the scientific horsepower and storytelling ability to make a large impact on drug development, business, and the lives of patients. At the age of 8, Nina was diagnosed with an ovarian teratoma. In some ways, that shifted Nina towards a career in science and a mission to cure cancer. But while she was always interested in science, growing up in the suburbs of New York City enabled her to become world-class oboe and bassoon player as well. But in her words, she chose the research path rather than joining a conservatory because "science is a way to help other people [while] music is fun." At Williams College, she studied mathematics and biology and became interested in the progress going on in the cell therapy space, particularly CAR-T. This is around 2014 when companies like Juno Therapeutics, Novartis, and Kite Pharma were engineering patient T-cells to hone in on lymphomas. With a growing interest in bioengineering and the early clinical successes in CAR-T, Nina was compelled to join the LEAP program at Boston University to study bioengineering with a goal of engineering immune cells to target cancer.
After applying to a number of graduate programs, Nina ended up at Stanford. She rotated through 5 labs: Irv Weissman, Garry Nolan, Crystal Mackall, Edgar Engleman, and John Sunwoo. These experiences ended up having a major impact on her research where she was able to have the flexibility to pursue the projects she was excited by in cell therapies and use various tools/methods she picked up from the other 4 groups in her graduate research. Early-on in grad school, her cancer relapsed and she was treated again. One thing about Nina is her grit. She was able to still move forward with her work despite all of this. Truly amazing.
Her first project ended up not working out perfectly but taught Nina how to choose problems to work on. Michael Fischbach helps teach a class at Stanford, BioE 395, on this topic that Nina and I would recommend checking out. Her next project focused on studying subtypes of NK cells in tumors and generating functional data to figure out if they are a unique class of immune cells or an artifact of single-cell sequencing. After figuring out how to run an experiment with 1 month of prep, around 4 days of work, and then 3 weeks of data acquisition and analysis (shout-out to Gail for the help), Nina was able to discover a novel functionality of a new NK cell type that resembles ieILC1s, which have potent anti-tumor activity. Once she was able to show the experiment worked, Nina did the harrowing experiment another five times to verify her discovery and did an incredible job to combine various tools to map out new NK cell biology. At the end of the conversation, we discuss her new job as Head of Research at ImmuneBridge and the opportunities she sees in cell therapies. Nina is truly a role model to scientists and cancer survivors everywhere.