BioBuilder Career Conversation: Samantha Atkins Transcript

Absolutely Sure. So I’m a senior scientist at Moderna. I joined here a little over two years ago and I started up a group called investigative pathology, and so what that is is I work very closely with vet pathologists on our team. We’re in early research and development. So we’re working on the medicines that are about five or 10 years away from the clinic. So all very novel, very new, cutting edge kind of drugs that we’re developing at our company. And we work in areas for cancer therapy, obviously, vaccines that you guys probably know about our COVID-19 vaccine.

We do a lot of different immunotherapies for autoimmune diseases and we’re also going after rare diseases. And the way that our medicines work is that we use something called mRNA and you guys are probably a little bit familiar with that from your high school biology classes. But mRNA is the blueprint that your cells use to make a protein, and protein is kind of what your body makes and that’s kind of what we see, and mRNA is kind of what we don’t see. And so the way that we can leverage that is that if we can deliver mRNA into a cell, that’s basically like delivering a gene that you might not have. So for people with rare autoimmune diseases or rare diseases, where they’re lacking a gene that makes them susceptible to some kind of disease. We can give them that gene and then their body will act as the bioreactor and make the protein from the gene that we deliver. So that’s kind of the basis of our genes, and so what I do at Moderna is when our vet pathologists run a study, normally and traditionally in all pharmaceutical companies you have to, unfortunately, put our medicine into animals before we can put them into human, and then we look and see was this treatment effective and was it safe in the animals?

Do we see any signs of toxicity? Is there anything wrong that we should be aware of before we get to humans, because we want to make sure that it’s safe. So I work with the vet to look at all of the organs after we do an animal study. Unfortunately, we have to kill the animals and then we take the tissues out of the animals and we can look at them and see do they look normal? Do they look healthy still? Was our medicine effective? And if there’s any time that our medicine looks like it might’ve caused a problem instead of helped, that’s where I come in and I investigate what that problem is. So that’s why it’s called investigative pathology.

So I’m really interested in looking at what is the molecular mechanism at the cell level that’s driving this change that we see, that we didn’t want to see. And then how can I communicate that to our chemists so that they can change our molecules to make them safer? And one of the ways that I do this is I work with something called organ on a chip technology, and so you see the little chip, the hand that’s holding that little, that’s called a chip, right under our vaccine picture. Yep, exactly right there. That is called an organ chip and it’s made out of a flexible plastic like silicone.

Oh, amazing. I love the analogy that you made of the body as a bioreactor taking mRNA and making protein.

It does so that kind of is what launched my love of science, and first it kind of started with anatomy lessons in our garage. So on the side my dad so my dad was a machinist. I’m from Northwest Indiana where we have a lot of steel mills, and so in his day job he worked in a steel mill. But on the side he had a taxidermy business. And if the students don’t know what taxidermy is, that is the preservation of dead animals. So if you ever see like a hunting lodge where they have like deer heads on the walls or or animal pelts and things like that, that’s what taxidermists do they preserve the animal hide. And so in order to preserve the hide, you have to obviously work with a dead animal and you have to dissect it, take all its organs out, hide. You have to obviously work with a dead animal and you have to dissect it, take all its organs out, and then you have to fix it with certain chemicals to preserve it. And so I grew up around my dad who was dissecting animals in our garage, and so you know, at a very early age I was getting anatomy lessons as he was taking the organs out of the animals and handing me livers and spleens and kidneys and explaining to me what they were. And once I saw the inside of the body and saw how it worked, I just really became fascinated with anatomy.

And I really, for most of my life growing up, I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor and that’s really what I pursued. You know, in high school I was preparing myself to go to pre-med for college. I thought that’s what I really wanted to do. And then I had an experience in high school where I was allowed to shadow some doctors at a hospital and I ended up going there and realizing like wow, this is kind of a traumatic job. My first day in the hospital I was in the radiology department where they do x-rays, and I thought, oh, this is going to be like an easy laid back kind of day. I’ll just watch a lot of doctors putting the x-ray up on the backlit screen and looking at bones and it’s going to be a walk in the park. But instead on my first day we it was the day before 4th of July so the first victim that came in had his fingers blown off by a firework and we had to x ray his hand to look at the damage to his fingers. And then the next person that came in was a gunshot victim that had a bullet lodged in the back of his brain. And then the next person that came in was a stabbing victim and the handle of the knife blade had broken off and the blade was somewhere in his abdomen and we had to figure out where the knife was inside of him.

And after I saw the interaction with the patients who were suffering and in a lot of pain and just having the worst day of their life, that kind of made me realize like I don’t want to be in a setting on a day-to-day basis where I’m interacting with people when they’re at their worst. And so then it kind of threw me into a whole spiral of I thought my entire life I wanted to be a medical doctor, and now I’m in my senior year of high school and I just realized this isn’t what I want to be at all. What am I going to be a medical doctor? And now I’m in my senior year of high school and I just realized this isn’t what I want to be at all. What am I going to do? What do I do from here?

Yeah, thank you. So yeah, I went to undergraduate at a really, really small technical school in Indiana. So I’m from Indiana and I bounced around a lot of different colleges within Indiana. I went to a small school called Rose Holman Institute of Technology. It was actually all male up until 1995. And so when I went there in 2006, it was very much still kind of a male dominated field and a male dominated school. I think the women at that school were about 15% when I attended and the women’s bathrooms weren’t. There wasn’t even a bathroom for women on every floor in our academic buildings and some of our dorm rooms were even converted or co-ed because they just didn’t have the space to even put the women. So that was like a very interesting experience and I could probably tell a million different stories just about that. But I made it through my undergrad and I could probably tell a million different stories just about that.

But I made it through my undergrad and I really knew that I wanted to have a research career because when I graduated it was during the around the 2008 recession, and so at the time my dad he was laid off and he wasn’t. He wasn’t able to find work for a while and I saw my mom and dad like really struggling financially and also my dad was struggling a lot mentally because, you know, being the main breadwinner of a household and then having your career taken away from you, I think it puts a lot of stress and a lot of toll on a person. And so it kind of hit me and I realized like, well, you know what, if, what, if I get laid off, like what, how am I going to support myself? And at the time I had a professor and I remember he made a comment and he was like I can tell you guys that none of my friends that have a PhD are in the unemployment line right now. And for that just stuck in my head and I just realized at that moment well, I guess I’m going to grad school then.

So I signed up to do a master’s degree because where I went for undergrad they didn’t offer any research experience. So instead of getting straight into a PhD program, like a lot of people do after their undergrad, I went and did my master’s at Purdue and that’s where I really learned how to do tissue engineering types of work and that’s where you’re working with cell culture and you’re patterning cells together in a certain way to have the cells regenerate and make miniature organs. So I went to Purdue and that’s where I learned, like most of the skill set. That became like the basic foundation for all of my research to come. And after I got my master’s from Purdue and after I got my master’s from Purdue I worked on my master’s in a cartilage regeneration lab. So we were reprogramming cartilage cells in the knees to start replicating again, because your knees, they don’t have any blood supply in them, so when you get an injury to your cartilage your cartilage can’t repair itself because there’s no way to bring in new cells to the area to repopulate it. So we were trying to manipulate the cells that were already there to regenerate themselves. And that’s what I worked on during that time.

So so that’s fantastic. I love the sort of openness you had in your educational path to you know the topics you were interested in, to you know the topics you were interested in, but that the questions themselves were, you know the platform, the cells themselves were just part of it, right, yeah, thank you, that’s wonderful. And so you know if you were thinking about being in the job you are now and it sounds like you really like it and that you’re doing amazing work in it.

Yeah, I was just thinking today I really wish I took organic chemistry. That’s one class I haven’t had. Actually I just took gen chem. So, um, yeah, I really missed, missed out on that one. And I’m even thinking of enrolling in an undergraduate course for organic chemistry because I think it would help me a lot with my career today.

Um, but my main thing is just be open-minded. Always be flexible in your thinking. Don’t tie yourself to um a certain it has to be certain, it has to be this or it has to be this research. I have to work on cartilage. When I got into this field, I really wanted to work on cartilage because rheumatoid arthritis runs in my family and I had a cousin that got juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when she was three years old, and so every year when I would blow out the candles on my birthday cake, I would always wish for her to get better.

I love that. I’m going to keep my pencils close by. I think that’s amazing advice. How fabulous. I have asked you lots of questions. I want to make sure that the students, if they have questions, can either drop them in the chat or can come on unmute before we let you go, and you can.

I do also um. Moderna offers internships and co-ops. I just hired a co-op to join me for six months. Internships and co-ops. I just hired a co-op to join me for six months. She’s an undergraduate at Northeastern University.