Women in drug discovery research - a WISE choice
Dr. Laleh Alisaraie believes it’s important to train talented, determined young women to conduct future research.
“The number of female scientists is obviously less than males, so it’s important to encourage young women to join us– they’re brilliant and if they are trained properly early on in their educational program, they can certainly manage challenging projects when they are front line researchers.”
Women In Science and Engineering (WISE) is a non-profit, incorporated volunteer organization that aims to increase the participation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers by increasing awareness that these professions are rewarding and exciting options for women. The Student Summer Employment Program is WISE NL’s flagship program and provides young women in grade 11 with the opportunity to work for eight weeks in paid Science and Engineering Research Assistant roles.
Last summer, Sara Moss and Sarah Wilkins became the first students in the program doing research in Computational Medicinal Chemistry in Dr. Alisaraie’s research lab. Ms. Moss and Ms. Wilkins worked on a part of a significant Chemoinformatics project, exploring how and why chemotherapeutic drugs cause side effects.
“They received the necessary instructions and the scientific background required for running their projects, and learned the application of specific chemistry and molecular biology software packages, which were utilized as their research tools.” explained Dr. Alisaraie. The goal was for the students to gain a better understanding of how chemistry of drugs directly affects their medicinal properties, and how physics and computer science can serve modern drug discovery.
Ms. Moss said the program helped her catch a glimpse of what working with science is like.
“Our project focused on reducing the unwanted side effects and symptoms of anti-cancer drugs used to treat ovarian and breast cancers. The fact that our work was towards a project that will hopefully better drug treatment for cancer patients was very rewarding,” she said.
A typical day involved researching anti-cancer drugs, cataloguing and coding their research into documents, working with computer databases and programs to study chemical structures of drugs and proteins.
“The project was a real-life attempt to fix the problematic side effects of real anti-cancer drugs. We were working towards making a difference in the scientific field and in the lives of cancer patients.”
Since last year, Dr. Alisaraie has continued being an advocate of the WISE program. This summer she also welcomed Kailey Gillingham to her lab. She plans to offer placements to other students via the program in the future.