Deborah Plana. Image: Gretchen Ertl
As a high school student in Miami, Deborah Plana loved the quantitative sciences. Then her biology teacher talked about new drugs being tested to treat genetic diseases and the many questions that still weren’t answered in the life sciences, and Plana’s interests expanded.
“I love physics and statistics. I love working on research that has an important technical piece. But just as much, I love to do research that could meaningfully improve patients’ lives,” said Plana, who is graduating this year from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program as a physician-scientist with an MD to join her PhD.
Personal experience with cancer in her family cemented Plana’s determination to pursue a career that combines medicine and research.
“Human health problems impact people and their families so intimately,” she said.
A physician-scientist is born
While her scientific interests were born in Miami, Plana herself was born in Caracas, Venezuela. As the country moved from a democracy to a dictatorship, her parents decided to immigrate to the U.S.
Graduate Profiles
Plana attended the Academy for Advanced Academics program through the Miami school system. The program allowed her to take college courses in addition to advanced placement classes, giving her the chance to be on a college campus and interact with people doing research.
As an undergraduate at MIT she majored in biological engineering with a minor in statistics and data science. She worked in the lab of bioengineer Douglas Lauffenburger, combining experiments with computation and learning how to translate preclinical work to clinical success.
“I became specifically interested in the question of how we do a better job of understanding how drugs work, how we make better drugs, and how we better assign drugs to individual patients,” she said.
Figuring out how to improve success rates for new therapies piqued Plana’s interest in taking care of patients directly. It also led her to the field of systems biology with the idea of using patient data to model how drugs behave in the body.
From bench to bedside to bench
Plana pursued her vision when she came to Harvard Medical School as an MD/PhD student. In 2022, she earned her PhD in systems, synthetic, and quantitative biology from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (now the Griffin GSAS).
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Plana joined her PhD adviser, Peter Sorger, the Otto Krayer Professor of Systems Pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, and Nicole LeBoeuf, HMS assistant professor of dermatology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in responding to the shortages of personal protective equipment through the Greater Boston Pandemic Fabrication Team (PanFab).
As a coordinating lead, she helped recruit students to what became a 150-person volunteer effort and managed the group’s projects. Those included the production and distribution of face shields for frontline health care workers, incorporation of sterilization of PPE into the workflow for reuse at a medical center, and creation of an open-source powered air-purifying respirator prototype.
At the same time, she was completing her thesis, Clinical Trial Data Science to Advance Precision Oncology, which looked at ways to enhance analysis of clinical trial results. In collaboration with researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, she digitized the information presented in graphs published in scientific studies and back-calculated the patient events that likely led to those results.
She showed that researchers can reanalyze existing trial data to assess drug synergy in animal models and human data, predict the likelihood of trial success from small sample sizes, and model long-term benefits of new therapies using short-term trial results. She hopes the work provides a new tool scientists can use to deal with data challenges presented by relatively small patient populations, patient stratification, pediatric populations, and patients with rare diseases.
Part of Plana’s focus on oncology stemmed from her and Sorger’s work with her other PhD adviser, Adam Palmer, at the time a postdoctoral fellow in systems pharmacology at HMS. The team worked closely with oncologists on data coming from clinical and preclinical trials to see whether they could improve how treatments are assigned to patients and understand variation in treatment response.
Plana hopes her work convinces others that it is worthwhile to share the raw data generated in clinical studies and that there are interesting insights to be gained from additional analysis — something she says many trial participants support.
“To me it seems almost a moral responsibility to make the most we can out of the data being generated,” she said. “Surveys of clinical trial participants overwhelmingly report that they want their data to be reused.”
Personalizing data
Plana shares with those patients the desire for knowledge to flow in both directions between the lab and the clinic. She looks forward to facilitating such “bench to bedside” and “bedside to bench” exchanges as she begins her residency in a combined anesthesia research track at Massachusetts General Hospital later this year.
When she finished her PhD and went back to her clinical rotations, Plana saw how much information anesthesiologists collect during surgery — blood pressure, amount of oxygen in the blood, how well patients are responding to the operation — and compared it to the data oncologists use.
“Oncologists think about how to better assign drugs to individual patients and how to manage toxicities,” she said. “I feel like anesthesiologists and critical care doctors do something similar in a very, very short time frame.”
“I want to use systems biology to identify personalized interventions for patients that are based on the same tools and principles cancer doctors use but that anesthesiologists and critical care doctors can apply in the short time frames they work within,” she said.
Head and heart
For Plana, the quantitative and the human aspects of being a physician-researcher drive each other.
“To me, they are not all that different,” she said. “So many of the things I have enjoyed researching have come from being in a clinical setting and having emotional reactions.”
“It is so important to make big choices with our heart,” she said.
For Plana, the importance of the human element also extends to the people who have influenced her, who include Lauffenburger, Sorger, and Palmer.
She also credits her parents, María Alba and Alberto, and dedicated her PhD to them. “Their bravery and vision in leaving Venezuela to come to the U.S. made this and all other opportunities possible,” she wrote.
Personal Journeys, Common Purpose
Celebrating the accomplishments of the Class of 2024
