Francis, what exactly do you do...?

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Many of you have asked what I've been up to since I graduated from George Mason in May, so I thought I'd dedicate this post to my fellowship and what projects I've been working on! As of June 2nd, 2014, I have been a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health, the US government's main agency responsible for biomedical research. The NIH is comprised of 27 different institutes and centers, including the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID). In particular, I work within the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), which focuses on solving problems related to translating the knowledge generated in basic research laboratories into human therapies.

I'm involved with NCATS' Therapeuetics for Rare and Neglected Diseases program (TRND), which studies diseases with very small patient populations. Not only do these diseases lack enormous patient advocate organizations (such as the American Heart Association), they tend to get very little research funding because there is almost no opportunity for profit. After all, with the average therapeutic costing billions of dollars and years to develop, why would a pharmaceutical company want to pursue something that it would never make a buck on?

Of course, that's an extremely oversimplified explanation of a complicated problem. In fact, many firms have dedicated research programs for rare diseases. Improving this scenario by advocating for innovations in the drug production pipeline (a more detailed description of this will follow at a later date) is critical, which is where we come in.

As of today, I'm working on some drug discovery projects related to the following: X-Linked Creatine Transporter Deficiency (CTD), Pulmonary Alveolar Proteinosis (PAP), and a side projected related to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). I'm really loving what I do, and I'm so thankful to have this unique opportunity to work on critical problems facing human health. While I certainly miss my flies, working with human cells is a whole new adventure!

For more information, check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYd5zxvF4HQ