Daniela Ortiz Chavez grew up in a Mexican border town and spent hours each day crossing into the United States to attend school. Then she was a first-generation college student. Now she’s a PhD candidate in cancer biology at the Graduate School at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, working in the lab of CU Cancer Center Deputy Director James DeGregori, PhD, delving into the secrets of blood cancer.
Ortiz Chavez is one of just nine graduate students nationwide to receive this year’s Minority Hematology Graduate Award from the American Society of Hematology (ASH), a program that aims to encourage graduate students from historically underrepresented groups in the United States and Canada to pursue careers in academic hematology.
Her mother and cousin happened to be visiting her in Colorado when the email came from ASH. “I clicked on it, and then I see ‘congratulations,’ and I got very excited,” Ortiz Chavez says. “It was perfect for my mom and cousin to be there, because they’ve supported me all the way.”
The ASH award includes an annual $40,000 stipend for a two-year period to fund Ortiz Chavez’s research and for her to attend the ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition, where she will present research findings and be matched with mentors. And she has received ASH membership through graduate school.
Daniela Ortiz Chavez (lower row, center), James DeGregori, PhD (upper row, second from right), and other members of the James DeGregori Lab in 2022. Photo courtesy DeGregori Lab.
Ortiz Chavez focuses on understanding therapeutic resistance in leukemia. “It’s a privilege to continue working toward defeating leukemia with all of the outstanding hematologists in the ASH society,” she says.
“Dani is a joy to have in the lab,” says DeGregori, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. “She’s intellectually curious, extremely dedicated to cancer research, and highly creative and smart. Importantly, Dani has the fire in the belly that is so key to success in research. If I were to pick a word to describe Dani, it would be ‘perseverance.’”
‘A bad prognosis’
Ortiz Chavez’s area of research interest is acute myeloid leukemia (AML), which represents about a third of leukemia diagnoses. It’s more common among people age 65 and older and in men. AML starts in the bone marrow and can quickly move into the blood. It can spread to other parts of the body, including the lymph nodes, liver, spleen, central nervous system, and testicles.
Ortiz Chavez strives to understand how the bone marrow microenvironment contributes to resistance to targeted therapies in patients with FLT3-mutated AML, and how to overcome that resistance. About 30% of AML patients carry FLT3 mutations, making it one of the most frequently mutated genes in the disease.
“It’s a bad prognosis, and we’re trying to overcome that,” she says. “The current treatment for it is very aggressive and harsh, and given that AML is more a disease of age, older people can’t handle it. We’re trying to offer other therapies that don’t affect their quality of life and hopefully help them survive.”
Long hours at the border
Ortiz Chavez is the child of two Mexican citizens who, as she puts it, “strategically birthed their children across the border in the United States,” making them U.S. citizens, so they could pursue an American education.
She grew up in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, an industrial and farming town across the border from Douglas, Arizona, where she attended middle and high school. She estimates she and her father (who drove her to school) spent about 2,200 hours waiting in line to cross the border.
In high school, Ortiz Chavez took a biomedical research class that led to an internship helping a radiology tech at a Mexican hospital. “Anytime I would develop the film and I’d see a mass, that’s when I started asking questions: Why did this person develop a mass? Is it malignant? That’s kind of where my brain was at,” she says.
Ortiz Chavez couldn’t afford a four-year college, so she enrolled at Pima Community College in Tucson. “I took my first chemistry class, and I was captivated,” she says. “This drove my desire for a career in science.”
‘A lot of potential’
Through a work-study program, Ortiz Chavez worked part time at the college’s chemistry prep lab. Her supervisor there taught her chemical reactions that weren’t covered in her classes. “He believed in me and told me I had a lot of potential,” she says. “He helped me do my transfer application to the University of Arizona, and he called it that I was going to be a cancer biologist.”
With help from scholarships for STEM students, Ortiz Chavez enrolled at the university as a biochemistry major and was one of eight students out of more than 300 applicants accepted into its elite Maximizing Access to Research Career program. She also was accepted into a summer research program at Stanford University. “I learned the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in research through this experience,” she says.
Since entering grad school at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus in 2021, Ortiz Chavez has benefitted from several key mentors, including DeGregori, whom she calls “a visionary in all the things we need to understand to be able to intervene in cancer.” She also names CU Cancer Center members Craig Jordan, PhD, head of the Division of Hematology, and Benjamin Bitler, PhD, holder of the D. Thomas and Kay L. Dunton Endowed Chair in Ovarian Cancer Research, and Mark Gregory, PhD, assistant research professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.
After completing her PhD, Ortiz Chavez hopes to continue her training through a post-doctoral fellowship, possibly in Europe. And then, she says, “I hope to return to Colorado. I had never been here before, and I love everything about it.”
As she pursues her research, Ortiz Chavez thinks of her tías – one of her aunts – who was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia a few months ago.
“It used to be a death sentence,” she says. “But now there’s this drug called imatinib that has revolutionized treatment. They’re not completely cured, but people’s quality of life is drastically improved compared to previous chemotherapies. That is an inspiration for me to continue my training and go even further, so that I can offer that same hope to AML patients. One leukemia at a time.”
