Maddie Hurwitz’s National Cancer Institute Internship
Maddie Hurwitz is currently a full-time senior at OHS. Outside of school, Maddie plays the flute, runs the Model UN Club at OHS, enjoys activities outdoors, and reads/watches science fiction/fantasy books/movies/TV shows. In school, while Maddie does enjoy both humanities and STEM subjects, she is especially interested in biology and chemistry. Maddie is considering pursuing a career in biomedical research (or at least in the health fields), so last summer she obtained an internship at an immunology lab at the National Cancer Institute (part of the National Institutes of Health). Pixel Journal contributor Antonia Mrose learns more about Maddie’s experiences below.
Pixel Journal: What was your internship focused on?
Maddie Hurwitz: During my summer internship, I had the privilege in contributing to my lab's ongoing project in creating synthetic alarmins. Alarmins are a type of cell signaling molecule (essentially the messengers in cell to cell communication) that is essential in regulating immune responses. My lab, as a way to target certain immune pathways and harness the properties of alarmins, created several variants of synthetic alarmins. Hopefully, one day these synthetic alarmins will be used as therapeutic drug treatments for immune conditions and/or cancer. My work focused on taking two of these synthetic alarmins and testing if they activated the immune pathways they were expected to.
PJ: What brought you to taking this internship?
MH: As I mentioned previously, I was interested in working in a lab as part of my career exploration and development process. I'm currently trying to decide whether I want to pursue a more clinical or research based medical track and wanted some practical experience to help me in my decision (which I am certainly still in the process of making). I ended up in an immunology lab because I find how small changes on a cellular level can impact large scale health absolutely fascinating and the immune system is a perfect model for that.
PJ: Do you have future plans with this research?
MH: Since my work was quite self-contained (within an eight-week internship), I currently do not have any plans to personally pursue this research further, although I greatly enjoyed my time at the lab and the experience in this project was absolutely amazing. However, the lab is continuing work and after more characterization of the alarmins (like I was doing), they will likely move into in vivo mouse models to test the greater immune pathway effect on conditions such as cancer.