Bojana Jovanovic | Class of 2022

Bojana Jovanovic, PhD, MMSc, already knew how to investigate cancer in the laboratory. As a cancer biologist, she had spent years at Vanderbilt University Medical Center studying the molecular drivers of triple-negative breast cancer. But during her PhD training, she got her first real taste of clinical research: contributing correlative analyses to an early-phase trial and working with actual patient samples and data. It led to a published paper, and the experience stayed with her.

When she moved to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for a postdoctoral fellowship, the work turned more translational, a step removed from the clinic. She missed the directness of it. “I started looking into what the options were out there,” she says.

The Master of Medical Sciences in Clinical Investigation program offered exactly the training she was missing. Jovanovic chose the Clinical Investigation track, since it covered ground that her laboratory background never had.

“I had tons of wet work experience and bench work,” she says, “but I never really participated in designing a trial.” That meant learning protocol development, regulatory requirements, trial operations, and the way physicians think through questions of treatment and patient care.

“There’s a lot of parts to it,” she adds. “You need to understand the medical field and how physicians think. They have their own lingo that you need to learn. And then there’s a lot of regulatory things involved in the submission of the protocol, setting up a trial, and getting it off the ground.”

She discovered the program early in her postdoc, decided to wait, and ended up applying near the end of her fellowship, finishing one and starting the other at the same time. Jovanovic entered in the summer of 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was upending nearly every expectation about graduate education. Classes moved online, international classmates faced travel restrictions, and the school had to adjust continually to shifting public health guidance.

Jovanovic remembers being impressed by how well it all came together anyway. “The leadership of that program was fantastic,” she says. “They really pulled everything together.” Group projects meant coordinating across time zones with classmates still abroad, trading off early mornings and late nights so no one person carried the burden.

Parts of the program eventually returned to campus under social-distancing rules, but Jovanovic’s own thesis was well suited to the circumstances regardless. With years of bench work behind her, she didn’t need more of it. Her project centered on analyzing data from a completed Phase 1 breast cancer trial rather than conducting new lab research; the trial had closed early, partly because of the pandemic, leaving a body of data that needed to be understood and written up.

“I lucked out,” she says. “Breast is my background, so that was fantastic,” she says. “The cancer type was what I was familiar with, but the process of understanding the data from the trial, how to analyze it, how to display it, how to package it into a paper—all of that was something that I needed to learn.”

Sara M. Tolaney, MD, MPH, served as Jovanovic’s thesis advisor, and she credits Tolaney’s mentorship with making the whole experience run smoothly. “She moves at the pace that I like, and is just very personable,” Jovanovic says. “She was very responsive, very smart. It was fantastic.”

Jovanovic also worked closely with Shom Goel, MBBS, PhD, then a member of Tolaney’s research group, who relocated to Australia partway through the project. Distance didn’t stop the collaboration, though meetings sometimes landed at unconventional hours to bridge Boston and Australia and keep the work moving. “When you have a good team of folks who will not take a challenge as a hurdle, but actually try to make something out of it, it always works out,” she says.

The program requires two published papers in two years, a high bar for such a short window. Alongside the trial paper with Tolaney, Jovanovic completed a translational paper with her postdoctoral advisor, Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD, work that had been finishing up from her Dana-Farber years. Together, the two projects sharpened her ability to move fluidly between laboratory and clinical research.

Some of the most useful preparation happened outside the thesis experience. Through coursework, Jovanovic and her classmates practiced building clinical trial protocols from scratch, thinking through trial design, regulatory requirements, and the many roles that have to align before a new treatment ever reaches a patient. That teamwork turned out to be a good rehearsal for what came next.

After graduating in 2022, Jovanovic moved from academic research into industry. She is now a director on the clinical biomarker development team at Eli Lilly, serving as biomarker lead for several oncology assets, work that sits exactly at the intersection she’d been trying to reach since her PhD: the molecular biology of cancer and the development of new treatments. Biomarkers help researchers understand what’s driving an individual patient’s tumor, identify who is likely to benefit from a given therapy, and track whether a treatment is having its intended biological effect.

In early-phase development, that means Jovanovic constantly works across teams as new oncology therapies move toward testing in patients. “Whenever we have a new asset in the pipeline and we need to get it to the patients, there’s a whole process that’s involved. The biomarkers are kind of like a bridge between these functions,” she explains.

The overlap with Jovanovic’s graduate training still strikes her. “In some ways, it was like a practice run within the program that became a reality,” she says. The degree also helped her complete a transition that she’d already started envisioning before applying to the Clinical Investigation program.

Jovanovic knew that she wanted to move from academia into industry and work directly on clinical trials and drug development; so rather than earning a degree and hoping it revealed a destination, she worked backward from the goal itself. “I asked myself, ‘Okay, what do I need? What skill set do I need to be there?’” The Clinical Investigation program filled in that missing layer.

She’s candid about the effort it took to get there. Jovanovic was finishing her postdoctoral work, starting a new degree, living through a pandemic, and expecting her first child, all at once. “I took two weeks off to go have a baby and came back and continued,” she says. “It was a bit hectic!” Still, she has no regrets about pursuing the degree during such a demanding stretch. “It definitely served me well down the line during my job search, and also during my current job.”

Jovanovic believes that the most useful path through the program looks different for every student, depending on their background and goals: a physician hoping to sharpen research skills needs something different from a PhD scientist trying to move closer to clinical development.

Her advice starts with knowing why you’re there. She encourages incoming students to map the gap between where they are and where they want to be, find a mentor suited to that goal, and let that shape their choices in the program. “What is your end game?” she asks. “What do you see yourself doing in five years, and where do you want to land?”

For Jovanovic, the answer was closing the distance between cancer biology and the treatments built from it. The Clinical Investigation program gave her the language, the methods, and the collaborative experience to make that crossing. “You need to have an understanding of what you want to do,” she says, “and the program can deliver. It really can.”

Written by Bailey Merlin