NEB Podcast #74 -
Transcript
Interviewers: Lydia Morrison, Marketing Communications Manager & Podcast Host, New England Biolabs, Inc.
Interviewee: Cynthia Ziwawo, M.D., Radiology Resident,Georgetown University; Geoff Hutchinson, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Immunology, University of Washington, Institute for Protein Design; Olubukola Abiona, M.D.-Ph.D. Student, NIH-Oxford Ph.D. Scholar
Lydia Morrison:
Welcome to the Lessons from Lab & Life Podcast, brought to you by New England Biolabs. I'm your host, Lydia Morrison, and I hope this episode brings you some new perspective. Today I'm joined by Dr. Cynthia Ziwawo, Geoff Hutchinson, and Olubukola Abiona, three incredible young scientists whose collaborative work was foundational to the development of the COVID vaccine. Cynthia, thanks so much for joining me today.
Cynthia Ziwawo:
Thank you so much for having me.
Lydia Morrison:
Can you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Cynthia Ziwawo:
Absolutely. My name is Cynthia Ziwawo. I am an incoming radiology resident at Georgetown University. Just recently finished my MD studies last year at Indiana University School of Medicine, but before that I was an NIH Postbac Research fellow.
Lydia Morrison:
Amazing. Congratulations on finishing up your medical school studies.
Cynthia Ziwawo:
Thank you.
Lydia Morrison:
So I'm curious if you could tell us more about what brought you to the field of STEM and what made you want to get a medical degree.
Cynthia Ziwawo:
Absolutely. I always note my parents as being my first glimpse into a career in STEM. I was raised by two nurses that are also immigrants from Malawi, Africa. And so from a young age, I was taught that education was going to be my passport to whatever I wanted to do in life. But more importantly, Olu and I joke sometimes that when you come from African parents, at least one point in your life, you're going to consider a career in STEM, whether it's engineering, medicine, this, that, and the fourth. So mine just happened to be medicine and my parents, once they heard that, obviously continued to encourage me to stick with it, but I don't think it was until I got to college where I really understood the steps that it would take to really solidify a career in medicine.
Lydia Morrison:
I know from listening to your seminar earlier today that it was sort of chance that brought you to be at the NIH Vaccine Research Center during the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. Could you tell us a little bit about that decision-making process?
Cynthia Ziwawo:
Absolutely, yes. 100% chance and just being at the right place at the right time. But I also always say the importance of having mentors that believe in you more than you believe in yourself. It was towards the end of my college career. I was graduating and towards December 2018, I'm a 2019 graduate, I was kind of lost on what I was going to do next. I understood that medicine was my end goal, but I needed to take time off to take the MCAT and really solidify time for that dreaded exam. And so I knew that would require a gap year out of me. And I had a mentor who suggested I consider doing a research fellowship. I had never heard of that or honestly thought that I was equipped to do something like that, but she had happened to pursue her Ph.D. alongside Dr. Kizmikia Corbett. So she was like, "I'm going to put you in contact with a former classmate of mine. She may be looking to bring someone on to her lab."
So I got chance to talk with Kizmikia, and the thought was she worked on coronaviruses, which I had never heard of before, and was planning to perhaps transition to her next phase of her career towards the end of 2019, maybe early 2020, which kind of coincided with the time that I was looking to take off before medical school. So it was like a mutual beneficial relationship. I'll bring you here, we'll have you help me finish up some projects alongside the rest of my team, and then you can prepare for medical school and gain some soft and hard skills. And it felt like a chance and a risk because I think sometimes school feels so permanent. And I really wanted to get a master's because it felt structured.
And this idea of going to the NIH to maybe get into medical school and maybe do the things that would get me to my next phase felt scary. But it happened to be the only option I had at that time. And her and Dr. Graham were so inviting and I could feel their presence and their mentorship before I'd even stepped foot on the NIH campus. So I said yes, and moved to Bethesda, Maryland in July of 2019, and ultimately started in August 2019.
Lydia Morrison:
What an amazing opportunity. I really didn't know that there was such a big postbac program that was available at the NIH. I feel like we hear a lot about postdoc positions and postdoc programs, but I love the idea of being able to try your hand at science yourself and to start coming up with some of those hypotheses and theories and start really thinking through those projects at such an early age. I feel like it's really before you get trained by PIs and start sort of thinking just like them. So I think it's a really cool opportunity to sort of bring some of that naiveté, but ingenuity to the bench so early. I think that's really cool. Could you tell us more about the role that you played in the development of the vaccine?
Cynthia Ziwawo:
Absolutely. So as I said, when I was recruited, it was specifically to help finish off some immunogenetic experiments that the lab was working on. And my first four months or so was really just getting comfortable with the lab with coronaviruses. And the most that I worked on was assays. So ELISAs and viral neutralization assays were my thing that I was learning. And then in January, we hear that there's a novel respiratory virus that's going around that might be coronavirus. And of course it ends up being the one thing that my team knows how to handle. And as the baby of the lab per se, it was scary because I'm just trying to learn how to succeed in science. And now we have this call to produce a vaccine that my mentors have the backbone for. And so I really came to play with the phase one clinical trial data with the viral neutralization assays and the ELISAs, as I said, because that was what I was recruited to complete even before the pandemic.
Lydia Morrison:
So you shared a quote during your seminar, and the quote was, mentors who believe in you more than you believe in yourself. And you spoke about the importance of a mentor suggesting what to do with your gap year and how to fill that. I'm curious if you have any tips for others on selecting mentors or choosing the right person that works well for you, or is someone that you feel like you can relate to? Do you have sort of tips for how you were able to find such amazing mentors in your career?
Cynthia Ziwawo:
I think obviously with Dr. Graham and Kizmikia, that was a matter of chance. And I have some mentors that are like that where I just happen to meet them in casual settings. But also sometimes when I'm seeking out mentors, I look for people that are in spaces that I hope to be in the future. And so I can really pick their brains about what have you done that got you to this point so that I too can adopt them into my methodology to hopefully get there as well. So I think it's definitely being approachable and being open to understanding that mentorship has all different shapes and sizes, and it's really the culmination of having different mentors that can get you to your end result.
Lydia Morrison:
Thank you for sharing those tips with us, Cynthia. Geoff, could you tell our listeners a bit about yourself?
Geoff Hutchinson:
I'm Geoff Hutchinson. I am currently a graduate student at the University of Washington in the Department of Immunology, but also at the Institute for Protein Design. But before that, I did a post-baccalaureate research fellow at the National Institutes of Health at the Vaccine Research Center, and along with my colleagues here helped develop the coronavirus vaccine in collaboration with Moderna.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, such an amazing story. Can you tell us what led you to a career in STEM?
Geoff Hutchinson:
Yeah, I think I've always, since I was a kid, I've always been fascinated by the natural world and interested in plants, bugs, animals, things like that. But I think when I really got interested in STEM in college, I got to do undergraduate research through the LSAMP, the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, which provided sort of extra funding for underrepresented students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds to get experience in the lab and get experience with research. And a lot of times I had sort of trouble concentrating in class, but when it came to research, when it came to actually being at the bench, I just lit up. I just enjoyed it so much.
Lydia Morrison:
It's a really cool difference between that academic book learning and being able to put that into practice and put your hands on the learning and discovery yourself. I assume that you met some pretty important mentors during your time.
Geoff Hutchinson:
Dr. Patricia Lange, Dr. Patty Lange, Dr. Lange. She was my first mentor, and so she was my mentor for undergrad, and she would always call me the chef, and she was the sous chef. And the whole idea being that I'm the one that's learning, so I need to be the one that's driving. And so a chef, she'd be the sous chef, but really she's the one telling me, put that there, add this to that measure to that line. And that's what made me really love science, not just the science that you get in class where it's like you're checking the right answer and a box where you're answering the right question, the sort of box part of it, but the actual investigation. And because of that, that led me to think I can really get into research. And that sort of paved the way for me to get to NIH and meet these guys and do the work that we did.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah. What an amazing opportunity you all had to be part of really pivotal and world-changing science. I'm curious if you could tell us more about your role in the development of the first mRNA vaccine.
Geoff Hutchinson:
Yeah. So when I joined the lab, I joined Barney Graham's lab at the Vaccine Research Center, the NIH in 2017. And so I had first started getting my feet wet in the lab doing influenza research, working on a universal flu vaccine. And a lot of the strategy towards that was thinking about vaccine development very structurally, thinking about proteins and how proteins can be arranged and shaped to get a good vaccine response, a good immune response. And some of the cool findings we found in that work led us to trying to do similar things in Coronaviruses. And so trying to develop pan-coronavirus vaccines was sort of like my foray into the field of coronavirus work, which is where these guys had already been working. And so I think when I joined into the team, it added, I kind of added a little bit more of a different sort of structural mindset to it.
We already had a very structural focus on it in the first place. But yeah, so I think there were these rumors of a pandemic or there were rumors of a virus spreading. And when it came out that it was a coronavirus, we already sort of had a blueprint to work off of. And so when the sequence dropped, I was the one that, whatever, Saturday morning, Saturday or Sunday morning, I guess that went in and was like, okay, if this is the whole genome, this should be the spike protein that should be the main target. And sent that to our mentors. So Dr. Kizmikia Corbett and Barney Graham, and they sent that to Moderna. And yeah, it all kind of fumbles out from there.
Lydia Morrison:
Well, I don't think it fumbled out.
Geoff Hutchinson:
Not fumbles. I shouldn't say fumbled. It all culminated out from that.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah. So I was just going to say, I mean, it seems really serendipitous that you are all doing this work to be able to create these mRNA vaccines. And I'm curious from your perspective, is it serendipitous or is it good strategic planning, or is it the importance of basic scientific research and carrying on that? What do you think put you in the position to be able to respond so quickly to such a huge crisis?
Geoff Hutchinson:
Yeah, I think it's all the above. I think that there is a huge aspect of serendipity to it, and I think it's a great word for it, but I think there's also a huge degree of preparation. There was a lot of work going into pandemic preparedness and vaccine strategies against viruses that have the potential to cause pandemics. There is a lot of work in that for a long time, long before we showed up, long before we got there. And so yeah, there is a lot of preparation ahead of time. And I think the serendipity kind of comes in that of all the pandemics, it could have been, it happened to be something that we had a blueprint on the shelf for. We knew what to do when it was a coronavirus and we found the spike. That's it, that we know what to do.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah. Well, I'm so glad that you were all working on that, that really helped bring the world to its first vaccine in such a short amount of time. I'm sure you haven't been sitting still since then. What are you up to currently with your research?
Geoff Hutchinson:
Yeah, so in research, I really like to dabble in the in-between fields. I like to kind of mix things. So at the VRC, I was interested in things we can learn from the flu group, how can we apply that to work in coronaviruses? And I'm still trying to do that sort of thing as I'm getting my PhD at the University of Washington. So I am the first and only graduate student in the immunology department that's also being co-advised at the Institute for Protein Design. And so my current mentors, Dr. Marion Pepper and Dr. Neil King, they've got very shared interests in vaccines and infectious diseases, vaccine development. But they come at these kind of common problems with completely different expertises. So Marion is an immunologist, and Neil King is a protein designer. He's an engineer. And so what I'm trying to do is come down to the fundamental immunology, get down to the basic immunology, and find out how your body responds to a vaccine.
What are the things that make it respond really well? What are the B-cells and the T-cells doing? How do they interact to get good antibody responses to fight off a bug? And can we make a vaccine that optimizes that kind of communication between B cells and T cells to finely tune an immune response? And then once we get that, can we make these parameters something that we can easily plug into a computer and say, I want to make a vaccine towards, say, a virus that has a really bad latent infection so we can get an optimal memory response versus say, a pandemic situation where you need as many antibodies as fast as possible to try and tampen down a rapid spread of viral uremia.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah. Well, I think it's amazing that you're still so committed to vaccine development, and I really love that you're coming at it from sort of this juxtaposition of bringing together different experts and I can't wait to see what the future of vaccines hold.
Geoff Hutchinson:
Thanks. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it myself.
Lydia Morrison:
Olu, thanks so much for being here to join us today.
Olubukola Abiona:
Thank you for having me.
Lydia Morrison:
Could you share with our listeners what your current role is?
Olubukola Abiona:
Yeah. So I am currently an MD-PhD student. I'm getting my MD degree from the Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio. But right now I'm completing my PhD through a joint partnership program between the National Institutes of Health and the University of Oxford.
Lydia Morrison:
Amazing. So do you do most of your work at the NIH?
Olubukola Abiona:
Yes. So the program is structured to be able to choose your own adventure to go back and forth between it. So it's more of a collaboration between both places.
Lydia Morrison:
Do you visit the UK to do research there too?
Olubukola Abiona:
Yes. So that's the fun part about the program as well. So I'll be able to do part of my PhD in the UK from anywhere from a year to two years, depending on how the project kind of develops over time.
Lydia Morrison:
What a great way to build collaborations around the world. I love those partnerships between different countries’ institutions. Could you share with our listeners what your role was in the development of the mRNA vaccine?
Olubukola Abiona:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think I can start off a little bit with the fact that, so I joined Dr. Graham's lab or Dr. Barney Graham's lab at the NIH VRC in 2017 straight out of college. I was working with Dr. Kizmikia Corbett as what I considered her first postbac. So and I kind of worked really closely together in the beginning. And because our team was a bit really small in the lab, I got the opportunity to do a lot of different things. So from protein, to viral neutralization, to running meetings. So then when the pandemic happened, I kind of had the training to be able to run point on different parts of the project.
But I would say one of the things I was really central in was the ability to produce the first SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein that we were then needed for the animal study or the preclinical study so we could be able to move into phase one. And then that was something that I ended up doing to provide protein to other collaborators in the world as well as to other people who were developing diagnostics and help them troubleshoot with their assays as well. So I kind of like to say that I did a jack of all trades kind of thing, as well as supporting other people in the lab or their assays or consulting with companies so that they're able to be able to move forward in their assays as well.
Lydia Morrison:
It seems like such a breadth of roles for a postbac individual to take on. You must be super well-organized and very mature.
Olubukola Abiona:
Thank you for the compliment. What I'll say is that the lab is where I kind of developed those skills. So it was understanding that organization was allowing us to be able to run this breadth of projects and finding a system that kind of worked best for me. But no, I wasn't the most mature. I was like, oh, I failed an experiment. This is my fault. But the lab taught me a lot of life lessons where it's like failure didn't have to be personal. It was more so this experiment failed. Okay, what went wrong? So getting more curious about something rather than taking it in as a person or saying that it's my fault.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah. And what a great life lesson, I think really beyond the scientific research and bench, I think we all experience that, right, the feeling of failure. But I think science is an important reminder that failure is an important step on the way to success. And certainly your team saw a lot of success. I know it took 66 days to release the mRNA vaccine to COVID the first vaccine. How is that timeline possible? From someone who's done bench science it seems absurd.
Olubukola Abiona:
I think the way that I kind of conceptualize it was I think not just the right place in the right time, but the right team as well. Because at the Vaccine Research Center, it being more industry-like meant that we were able to have the infrastructure that was needed to be able to develop a vaccine so quickly. You also were able to take it from the preclinical to then take it to phase one, in the same building or have a GMP-like production as well. So having the infrastructure of those different types of teams, I think was really critical to be able to do that as well. And then I think one of the things I would say is that the 66 days didn't mean that there weren't mistakes, that things didn't happen, but it was having a trust or a team science rapport in the lab that was already established where we all kind of cared about each other.
We knew about what was going on behind the scenes, we're helping support each other in our own projects and bouncing these ideas off. So then it became less about ego and more about the mission. And so in it being about the mission, when we first started to make the first protein with Geoff, it's saying, Hey, I don't know if I am really good at making DNA. Can you also make it with me so that we can do this at the same time and see if we're able to do that? Or, Hey, incubators fail all the time. So then I was like, Hey, let's just put another cell and a different incubator on a different floor so we don't lose any time. But that comes from understanding each other, what our strengths and weaknesses are, and then supporting each other so that we're able to have that kind of synergy in a lot of ways.
Lydia Morrison:
That's really amazing. And I definitely can feel the team vibe from you all. You all seem like you communicate together really well and give each other a lot of great notes and support just from observing you for the day. So I think you're all very lucky to have found each other at the NIH. I'm curious if you could share with us what kind of research you're up to now.
Olubukola Abiona:
Yeah, that's a great question. So I would say, obviously the experience with the pandemic was very instrumental in my development, but I think one of the things that really came up was this ability to take concepts from different fields and being able to apply it to others as well. So as we talked about making the spike protein with central research that we did, and on the basic virology level, however, it was core to all these different therapeutic or translational aspects.
So a lot of the research that I'm really interested in is also finding those concepts in different fields or learning what that looks like. One of them being in cancer immunotherapy or in looking at neurodegenerative diseases as well and getting a better sense of what is it that is going on in those fields that may be unknown. What is the core concept of it? And how can we be able to study the basic fundamental immunology or virology to be able to then apply it down the line translationally?
Lydia Morrison:
Well, I can't wait to see what you do with your future research and with your medical degree. What brought you to STEM in the first place?
Olubukola Abiona:
That is a great question and a funny story. I like to say that my mom hoodwinked me into science just because I had a very early interest in it growing up, however it was, and going and seeing if I wanted to do engineering and finding out that wasn't my passion, that I learned more about research. And in learning more about research, I was like, Hey, oh, we learn all this stuff in this book, but oh, people are actually doing experiments to make one line in a book.
And so that kind of led me to kind of research in that aspect, but also when it comes to why did I choose a career in STEM, it was honestly a lot of my postbac, right? It was seeing the thing that I was kind of looking for where basic science was able to have that potential of 10 to 20 years down the line, seeing what we're able to do with what we're learning right now. But seeing the ability to then apply it and have both of that was really what I said, Hey, I want to stay in this space. I want to stay in this realm.
Lydia Morrison:
Do you feel like the mentor, your mentors affected ... The mentors that you had while you were a postdoc, did those affect the trajectory that your career has had?
Olubukola Abiona:
Yes. I think one of the biggest things going from undergrad, which would've been more prescriptive into research, is that looking for the safe spaces and thinking, oh, I have to be this way, or it has to be done a certain way. And what Dr. Graham and Kizmika and Dr. Corbett really did for me was instill in me this idea that there really isn't a limit to the ceiling, which was that they pushed me to explore or think about roles that I'd say, hey, why won't the staff scientists do this? Why isn't a PhD doing this? And they're like, well, you can do it. You have the talent, the skills, the idea to be able to do that. And so they never really said no, the person who limited myself was me. And so that became a very incredible thing. So that's one thing.
And then the second thing I'll just say is that the type of mentorship that Dr. Corbett and Dr. Graham provided was very unique in the sense that oftentimes mentorship is a growing process, but then when the student gets to a certain point, it's in their mentor's role to either step to their side or step behind to support them. And one of the things that I think that Dr. Graham and Dr. Corbett did very well was saying, Hey, I think that you've developed it well enough that I can now step behind you to support you and pushing you forward in your role in your career. So being, Hey, do you want to do CNN article? Do you want to talk on podcasts? Do you want this COVID vaccine? I know you guys are postbac, but we don't see you as a postbac. We see you as scientists, as colleagues. And I think that is a very incredible lesson that I have learned, which is being able to move out the way once people are able to blossom.
Lydia Morrison:
I think that's really beautiful. It sounds like clearly Dr. Graham and Dr. Corbett gave you all a lot of encouragement, but also a lot of space to grow and have this amazing opportunity to really be some of the thought leaders behind the mRNA vaccine and to help bring it to fruition. And so on behalf of all of us at NEB, I think I could also say probably the worldwide community.
Thank you all so much for your dedication to that research during a really difficult time period. And I hope that you all appreciate the amazing relationships that you were able to build during it. What an amazing opportunity and an amazing ability by all of you to bear through a crisis and to really bring a solution to a huge population of people. So thank you guys so much, and thanks for being here today to share your story.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Lessons from Lab & Life Podcast. As always, we invite you to check out this episode's transcript for some helpful links. And we hope you'll join us next episode, when I'm joined by Dr. Andrew Whitworth and Eleanor Flatt of the Osa Conservation. The Osa Conservation is working to protect Southern Costa Rica's invaluable biodiversity through ecosystem stewardship, scientific research and education, and sustainable economic development.
