Thanks to a Summer Fellow grant from the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, Sarah Issa, a rising senior at the University of Colorado Denver, will spend the next few months researching new treatment options for infant acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) under the mentorship of CU Cancer Center Program Co-Leader of Molecular and Cellular Oncology Patricia Ernst, PhD and Wenjuan Liao, PhD, as well as clinical mentor and CU Cancer Center member Craig Forester, MD, PhD.
With the grant, Issa, who has worked in Ernst’s lab as a research assistant for the past three years, will study how the protein Menin helps leukemia cells survive and spread through a genetic fusion. Liao has developed a novel B-cell acute leukemia model to compare what happens when Menin is completely removed, versus when it is only blocked by a drug. By studying the cancer cells in this new pediatric B-ALL model, they hope to find differences that explain why some cases resist treatment.
“Sarah is really ambitious — she has medical career ambitions as well as research, so she's been doing both in parallel, as well as taking the MCAT and keeping up with her classes,” Ernst says. “She keeps finding opportunities that complement her training in school and allow her to get more hands-on, real-life experience.”
Personal connection
Issa, who grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and the country of Jordan, where her parents are from, has a special interest in medicine because of her father, who had his first stroke around the time Issa returned to the U.S. from Jordan to attend high school in Colorado. She began working as a certified nursing assistant shortly after, shadowing doctors on the oncology floor at Children’s Hospital Colorado.
“Any kind of medical crisis hits hard, but the fact that your child is sick and is hurting and you can't do too much about it — that hits really hard,” she says of working with pediatric cancer patients. “Seeing how the patients and their families were dealing with it, and how nurses and physicians can have an effect in that area, was really interesting to me. Wanting to be part of that care process led me to oncology.”
The value of reassurance
St. Baldrick’s, a childhood cancer research organization, each year funds a small number of medical school and undergraduate college students through its Summer Fellow grants, allowing the students to devote all their time to research. Issa says she is grateful to be one of this summer’s awardees.
“It gave me reassurance that I can achieve bigger things,” she says. “When you're studying for the MCAT, it brings down your self-esteem a little bit; you’re like, ‘Can I really do this?’ It's a hard exam. Being able to get the reassurance of, ‘We believe in your goals in life, and we want to support you in doing that’ has been really heartwarming for me.”
Issa, who is a biology and psychology major at CU Denver, is equally grateful for the support and mentorship of Ernst, who she says is “the best boss I could have asked for.”
“I was really scared, because when I think about medicine, there are a lot of type-A personalities — people who are really strict, and everything has to go a certain way,” she says. “But Patricia takes a different approach to things. She's a lot more go with the flow, which I appreciate, because I can be a little type-A if something doesn't go exactly right. She's taught me over the years how to take it step by step. She’s very supportive, and she loves to teach. I can ask her a million questions in a day, and she's completely fine with answering all of them.”
