Student Spotlight: Emily Irvine, Senior in Molecular and Biomedical Sciences
Yaseen Balkhi, Ph.D., is an Institute of Medicine  external affiliate, instructor at 91¸£Àû with additional appointment as an assistant professor from Tufts University School of Medicine who serves as scientific director of IT Bio, a Boston-based firm he co-founded. He shared that Emily Irvine, a senior in Molecular and Biomedical Sciences is doing capstone 491-Molecular and Microbiology Research at IT Bio LLC (), Cambridge MA. IT Bio designs new anti-exhaustion therapies for cancer and chronic viral infection treatment.
___________________________________________________________________________
Emily talked about her experience: Due to COVID, I hadn’t been able to get much lab experience so when the Spring 2022 semester started I decided to look into options. Dr. Mumtaz Yaseen-Balkhi was my professor for both Molecular Genetics and Immunology at 91¸£Àû. He had published research on COVID, and my interests lie heavily in immunology, so I reached out to him to see if he had room for me in his lab. My advisor at 91¸£Àû suggested I inquire about interning for the summer at Immune Therapy Bio Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts and so I did. Dr. Mumtaz Balkhi and his colleagues were excited to welcome me.
My role for these two months of training under 491-Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Molecular Biology Research consists of studying T cell exhaustion in cancer. I am learning methods to induce CAR-T functional exhaustion as well as interventions to reverse it. Furthermore, this opportunity helps improve my tissue culture techniques, learn flow cytometry, plasmid preparation, and conduct ELISAs. I’m in the lab 4 to 5 days a week and attend weekly meetings, so I get to experience the inner workings behind a career in research. This is all incredibly useful since I’m interested in becoming a medical researcher and I’m grateful for this opportunity which will help me stand out when applying to grad schools this fall.