The HMGS Certificate Program

In addition to my regular course work in the Cell and Molecular Biology program, I opted into a special "certificate" program at Penn sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This program (or similar variants) exist in a few other schools around the country (I think there are a dozen of us in total). The program, currently called the HHMI Med into Grad Scholars Program, of HMGS. Basically the program is offered to interested graduate students in the biomedical sciences who want to get more exposure/get involved in more "translational research."

"Translational research" is one of those phrases currently in the biomedical community that means different things to different people, and is such a buzzword in the NIH that you can't find a single grant proposal without this phrase in it. Because of that, it's almost become a bad word, but generally speaking translational research expresses the linking together basic science research with clinical/medical practices. In my mind, translational research is supposed to be a close collaboration of the two, and a perfect example is a clinician who works on breast cancer in the hospital, and who also does basic research on the underlying mechanisms of breast cancer as a means of developing new therapeutics (this is actually a real example, I will talk more about him in a moment).

Anyway, what the heck does that mean for me, a lowly grad student? Basically the program functions similar to a minor in undergrad, in that you take some specialized courses that complement your training and which encompass this "translational research" motif. You also spend two or three weeks shadowing a clinician in a field of your interest during a summer to get real life exposure to the field, and there are a few talks and symposia associated with the program as well.

There are four classes involved, one each for the four semesters leading up to your Prelims. I am currently taking the first one, which is a journal club type class where we read two papers each week, a student presents one of the papers during the class and we discuss it. Specifically, each week has a unique clinical topic, and we are assigned a "basic science" and a "clinical" paper about it, and a resident expert in the field comes in as well. For example, my first paper was on large diffuse B cell lymphoma (a cancer of white blood cells in very watered down terms). My paper was a clinical paper that looked at using a proteasome inhibitor as a way to treat a particular subset of these patients with a unique molecular profile (I will spare you the details, although it was quite interesting). The other student that day presented a basic research paper that described the signaling pathways involved in this subset of cancer patients, which also explained why targeting the proteasome (normally a ridiculous idea as a therapy since you would screw up all sorts of stuff) actually made sense (in principle anyway). Other topics included obesity, HIV, color blindness, etc. It's been pretty cool.

The other classes include a cellular immunology course (I can't wait!), a basic physiology course, and finally a more advanced class that will look at the cellular/physiological pathology of certain diseases. They are all meant to be ways to expose us to more clinically relevant topics and help us apply our backgrounds towards the clinic.

In addition there are speakers from Penn who come in and talk to us about their research. The first speaker was a clinician who was a breast cancer specialist (as I alluded to above). In addition to his normal clinical practice, his lab was working on eliciting immune responses against breast tumors, and he already had some clinical trials in the works for some of the therapies that had come out of his lab and collaborators'. It was a really cool presentation and got me even more interested in doing basic science that would be more directly involved in human health.

I think it's a pretty cool program and so far I am really enjoying the exposure. Programs like these are not very common in most universities and it's an opportunity I am glad to take advantage of.