By Teddy Wohlbold (entering class of 2011)
Dmitriy Zamarin is a Mount Sinai MSTP Alumnus, Class of 2008, and current faculty member at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
What training did you do post graduation to arrive at your current position?
A research track residency (2 years) in Internal Medicine at Mount Sinai, followed by a fellowship in Hematology/ Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) (4 years). This is called “short tracking” – meaning your residency training is cut by 1 year and your fellowship training is extended for an extra year, allowing you to concentrate on what you are interested in. Upon completion of training, I stayed on as a faculty member at MSKCC, focusing on basic and clinical research in immunotherapy and gynecologic medical oncology.
What is your research/clinical breakdown on paper and in actuality
(in terms of what you do on a day
to day basis)?
Technically and on paper, I have to be in clinic one day a week and the rest of the time I spend doing research. Having said that, the actual boundary is a little more nebulous, because a lot of the clinic time is spent researching as well. For instance, I have a dual appointment in the Immune Therapeutics Center and in Gynecologic Medical Oncology, and am involved with research protocols in both of these clinics. Every patient in the Immune Therapeutics Center is actually a research patient, so technically I end up spending more time doing research, as seeing patients in clinical trials is a form of clinical research.
How are you able to balance clinical and research work?
It can be tough. What I have basically found is that the traditional breakdown of 80/20 (research/clinical) can only work if somebody is doing 20% of just seeing patients and 80% of doing research in the lab. If you want to be involved in both clinical research and basic science, it becomes much more complicated, because clinical research takes a lot of time. You can spend the whole day answering emails about patient eligibility for a certain protocol, or reporting the side effects to a company, for example. I think, that if you want to become an expert in your field, you eventually need to choose between clinical and basic science research.
What are some of your favorite memories at Mount Sinai?
Training aside, I think it is a really fun place to be. The academic and social environment of the institution was very supportive and great. I felt like I was not just an isolated person in a lab somewhere. I had a really good MD/ PhD class, and we have stayed tight-knit over the years.
Who were your mentors at Mount Sinai and how did they influence you?
I have to say my number one mentor was Peter Palese, my PI. He was my primary mentor, and I’m not just talking about him being a mentor in terms of being the laboratory head. When you’re going through training, you need more than a good mentor who will tell you what experiments to do. You need someone who puts your career as a priority, someone who will introduce you to other scientists and potential collaborators, a person who will promote your academic development and will pick up the phone and make that important phone call when you need it. Dr. Palese was never a bottleneck in any process and was most efficient in reviewing my manuscripts, grants, and thesis. I model after Dr. Palese when I interact with my own trainees.
In retrospect, is there anything you would have done differently during your time as an MD/PhD student?
I probably would have tried to expose myself to different fields or tried to learn more skills even if they did not necessarily apply to my work. I think, at the end of your training, you want to have a very large toolbox. Most people end up doing research that is not really relevant to their PhD work. In fact, the PhD is not about making you an expert in one specific little field – you just stay an expert in that field temporarily while you write your thesis. The purpose of the PhD is to teach you to use the scientific process, which you could hopefully apply to any field you end up going in to.
What kind of research do you do now?
I trained with Peter Palese, studying influenza viruses and pathogenesis. I thought that the most appropriate career choice for me afterwards would be infectious diseases, which would make sense, but when I did my rotations during third year, I became more interested in cancer. In line with my training in virology, I became interested in nonconventional treatment modalities, specifically oncolytic viruses, and I thought that this would be a good transition from virology to oncology. Oncolytic viruses are viruses that have a specific predilection to replicate in cancer cells as opposed to normal host cells. I became interested in using oncolytic viruses as a strategy to tag the cancer to be recognized by the immune system and therefore elicit an antitumor immune response long after the virus is gone. When I came to MSKCC, I I joined the laboratory of Jim Allison, who was one of the pioneers of the development of cancer immunotherapy, specifically immune checkpoint blockade targeting molecules like CTLA-4, which has now resulted in an FDA-approved drug ipilimumab. Dr. Allison agreed for me to bring my own project to the lab and to characterize Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV) as an immune therapeutic agent. During these studies, we found that this virus elicits a very strong anti-tumor immune response. We have done a lot of work in animal models, specifically using animal models that are resistant to immune checkpoint blocking antibodies like CTLA- 4 and PD-1. In these animal models, we have demonstrated that administration of oncolytic NDV can activate an antitumor immune response, making therapy with immune checkpoint antibodies effective, so we are very excited about that. We are now working on our clinical development of the virus as an anti-cancer strategy and we have a lot of data that delivery of this virus along with other new immune therapy modalities can be an effective strategy against cancer.