At the first lab Mariluz Soula worked at during college, she was immediately confronted with the realities of drug development. The principal investigator was testing a molecule that had been abandoned by a pharma company — something she came to learn occurred quite frequently as companies prune programs to prioritize the most lucrative ones.
But she also saw how her PI didn’t give up on the molecule. “That’s also really inspiring, because there’s kind of no limits,” she said. “The limit is yourself in a sense.”
That experience pushed her toward a career in research, eventually leading her to complete her Ph.D. at Rockefeller University, where she studied how cancer cells metabolized.
For her first project, she discovered that cancer cells make such high levels of a certain metabolite that it acts as an antioxidant, protecting the cancer cells from oxidative stress. The study was published in Nature Chemical Biology in 2020.
Soula then moved onto her next project, finding that cancer cells produce a certain lipid that exists on the cell membrane, protecting the cancer cells from the immune system. She discovered that blocking the production of that lipid with an existing drug improved the tumor-shrinking effects of immunotherapy, a type of medication that boosts the immune system to attack cancer cells, and saw an additive effect. The study was published in Nature this year.
After her Ph.D., she’s now embarking on a new venture as the first hire at a biotech called Lime Therapeutics. It’s a completely new challenge to build a team from scratch and assess the business implications of her research.
But as she learned from her first PI in college, if she believes in the science, “then everything else is just a domino effect. You just have to trust it, be diligent and be rigorous.”
—Elaine Chen
