Students and Alumna Develop Data Analytics Skills at BioCentury Internship

Two Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) students and a recent alumna contributed to the American Society of Hematology (ASH) 2017 Emerging Targets publication while serving as interns for BioCentury.

Obtaining the internship through resources provided by KGI’s Career Services, the trio includes Master of Business and Science (MBS) student Nebiat Hunegnaw, Master of Science in Applied Life Sciences student Lynn-Indora Edmond, and Ariel Brown, MBS ’17.

Hunegnaw, Edmond, and Brown conducted a survey of the emerging molecular targets at this year’s ASH conference. The results indicated that while harnessing the immune system to treat cancer remains a dominant interest, processes for tuning protein levels—from epigenetics and transcription, to translation and protein degradation—are garnering attention.

BioCentury defines emerging targets as those with low to no mentions one year that show a marked increase the next. Specifically, the count includes targets mentioned in two or fewer abstracts in ASH2016 that at least tripled in ASH2017, or that were absent last year and were mentioned in at least four abstracts at ASH2017. Grouping the targets by mechanism provides a weather vane for the direction of innovation in the field.

“The internship helped improve my data analysis skills and broaden my understanding of various indications, mechanisms of action, and molecular targets of pharmaceutical and biotechnology products ranging from drugs to diagnostics, to assays, to vaccines, and stem cell therapies,” Edmond says. “I’ve applied my science background and knowledge acquired at KGI to conduct quality control and validations of data science that contribute to translational science and life science ventures.”

Brown, who graduated in May 2017, is pursuing a career path as a data scientist. She says that working remotely as a BioCentury intern has helped increase her organizational and time management skills.

“As a group we efficiently organized information for subsequent teams to analyze quickly,” Brown says. “Our work created a more efficient technology that BioCentury can use to identify the most prominent targets to date.”

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