Interview Series: Early-Career Researchers

What is your role in the KATY team at CEA? What are you currently working on within the scope of KATY?
I am currently working on data harmonization and AI models development for treatment response outcome forecasting and biological deregulations. The objectives are to provide data and models to predict which treatment will be most suitable for a given patient through an explainable model decision. In brief, which treatment and why?

What motivates you, personally? What made you go into science?
Personally, I find method development toward a better understanding of the underlying biological factors of major health issues in humans most interesting.

What does it mean to you to be part of the KATY project?
Being part of the KATY project is a great chance to see clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) experts gathered to work toward the same goal: the improvement of knowledge and methods to tackle ccRCC.

What are your goals after KATY? How does working in the team of an international research project contribute to reaching these goals?
Following my involvement in the KATY consortium, I would like pursue research in bioinformatics. I will likely seek a position about human diseases, to learn and improve myself and leverage my skills in machine learning and statistics for biological issues.
The research in an international context is highly valuable to learn team-working and take advantage of a lot of different ideas and points of view from numerous research areas (artificial intelligence, biology, bioinformatics, etc.)

What is your role in the KATY team at the University of St Andrews? What are you currently working on within the scope of KATY?
My main role in KATY is to aggregate histological images of renal cancer cases, such as H&E (haematoxylin and eosin), immunohistochemistry and multiplexed immunofluorescence, and to identify and extract a number of different features from both renal cancer cells and tumour microenvironment. It includes, in particular, the density of blood vessels and immune cells and their spatial relationships.This will enable us to develop an algorithm to predict patient outcomes to the multiple drug regimens.

What motivates you, personally? What made you go into science?
Since 2006, I have been working in the field of cancer research and clinical trials. The more I was involved in cancer research, the more I felt that it is imperative to develop an algorithm to individually stratify cancer patients to the tailored treatment options. In order to contribute to this personalised medicine approach, I decided to work in the cancer research field.

What does it mean to you to be part of the KATY project?
The whole aim of KATY, which is to recommend an individualized treatment for renal cancer by providing AI-empowered clear explanations for various drug regimens, really fascinated me. In particular, integrating genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic data using different expertise and knowledge into AI-empowered personalised medicine is going to benefit not only renal cancer patients, but also consultants in the clinic. Therefore, I am honoured to be part of KATY.

What are your goals after KATY? How does working in the team of an international research project contribute to reaching these goals?
After KATY, I will continue to contribute to the cancer research field to benefit many people - similar to how five loaves of bread and two fish were used to feed the thousands.
In my opinion, working in the team of an international research project has the synergetic power to achieve goals in shorter time.

What is your role in the KATY team at Lund University? What are you currently working on within the scope of KATY?
My overall role is the harmonization of publicly available single cell RNA seq patient data. I merge different data sets together and create cell type annotations that can be used for deconvolution and prediction.

What motivates you, personally? What made you go into science?
During my PhD I came across a paradox I couldn't wrap my head around. A drug that is highly toxic in the normal kidney suddenly doesn't do anything at all anymore in kidney cancer. I'm too curious to not explore what on earth is going on in this cancer. While on job hunt after my PhD, I realized that this type of cancer is not the most popular to do research on. However, it is quite deadly, and I think there should be more attention to cancer types that might only affect a minority.

What does it mean to you to be part of the KATY project?
I have never been involved in such a huge project. It's a great experience to work with people that all have the same goal but everyone works on a slightly different angle and has a slightly different background. Not only does the project benefit from that, but also I can learn a lot from it.

What are your goals after KATY? How does working in the team of an international research project contribute to reaching these goals?
The overall goal is staying in research and working further on kidney cancer. KATY has already helped me in developing further skills on a technical point of view. From a more social perspective, it also gives me the opportunity to build a network of people all over Europe involved in the same research. That's a good asset to have if you want to survive in academia.