Amplified: Wistar Cell Engineer Dr. Colby Maldini on Making Live Cells into Future Medicines
Are you from a scientific family, and how did you get interested in science?
I’m a first-generation college student, so I certainly don’t come from a science-oriented family. I grew up in New England and am from New Hampshire. I grew to love science in high school and pursued it at Bates College, in Maine.
After graduation I was fortunate to get a position at Todd Allen’s lab at the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT and Harvard. There my science enthusiasm was stirred, and I fell in love with the study of HIV, viral infections and cure research.
It gave me a strong foundation for graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, which brought me to Philadelphia. There I worked in Jim Riley’s lab and continued (in the vein of Todd’s lab) engineering T cells for HIV infection and HIV cure. After, I didn’t pursue a traditional academic career, but instead transitioned into industry, and went to work at the biotech company Beam Therapeutics based in Cambridge.
Why did you decide industry over academia?
When I was in Todd’s lab, at the Ragon Institute, it was such an exciting time to be in Boston. I was with 20 other research technicians, and we were all in our 20s learning science and experiencing all the things associated with being in a new city at that age.
And, at the end of their two years, I had a lot of friends transition to biotech and pharma, and that really made me excited about that possibility.
2015 was the beginning phase of Boston’s growth and in the back of my mind a likely career path. But it was for the purpose of learning new skills, being exposed to a different part of science and growing as an independent scientist. I could do that in biotech and was fortunate to get a job at Beam, which was a pioneer of the base-editing approach to gene editing–a unique way to manipulate the genome that nobody else was pursuing.
Being there and part of their immunology group working on discovery related projects was a dream come true. I was learning something new and exposed to different disease areas outside of HIV infection, including cancer and autoimmunity. And having the resources that biotechnology companies have made it an attractive option.
Mine is an atypical kind of trajectory, but an awesome and valuable experience.
How did you pursue your work in biotech like an academic?
Most people in industry don’t publish a ton. Maybe that’s the need to keep your “special ingredients” secret and hidden from the rest of the world. And there’s obviously IP related concerns. But we were fortunate that my bosses & leadership were pro-publishing and forthright about sharing science. We were able to make contributions. This gave me a platform to apply to Wistar’s Caspar Wistar Fellowship Program, because I did have a foundation rooted in the universal academic currency of publishing. I enjoy discovery science and the exploration of where the science can take you.
Do you have any key people who influenced you?
Yes, I still collaborate with Todd Allen’s lab. That’s where I met Wistar’s Dan Claiborne. We worked together before I went to graduate school, & when he was starting as a postdoctoral fellow. Todd recently passed away, but he was a huge scientific mentor and personal mentor.
What type of scientist do you call yourself?
I consider myself a cell engineer. I like to think about problems that we have for implementing therapies, problems that T cells face in their environment, problems that impede effective immune responses and ask (myself) how do we fix it? You need to be able to diagnose the problem, but then what do we do once we know what the problem is? How do we fix it?
How do you see yourself fitting in with the science happening at the HIV Cure and Viral Diseases Center in terms of your bigger vision, and how are you going to plug and play with everyone?
I have a lot of experience in cellular engineering and genome engineering through my time, both at Penn and at Beam. And those are great skill sets to help facilitate the projects that Drs. Montaner and Claiborne are working on. I can bring other capabilities too, like genome editing to their work. But, like most of us here at the Center, we’re focused on developing a drug free HIV cure or remission.
We have great collaborators between the Penn and Wistar communities. And it’s such an awesome environment to pull together all these ideas and varied expertise.
And it’s not just limited to HIV infection. There are other severe human diseases & cancers in which we can apply these technologies. The lessons learned from one disease area like HIV can be used towards cancer and vice versa.
What are the most exciting parts of your work and what drives you about the research?
I’m excited to solve common problems and work with the scientists at Wistar, the people I’ll be recruiting into my lab and scientists in the greater community. I can’t wait to have those discussions rooted in a commonality, and a unique goal, that we will share as a group and a team going forward.
How do you envision your team?
I think in an ideal world you want everybody to have the same baseline skill sets. If we’re working on T cells, then everyone should know how to manipulate T cells, how to do your downstream assays and experiments, analysis, etc.
I’m the first one to admit, I don’t know everything, so I look to hire proactive people. You really can’t teach people to care about the science. For any given grad student or postdoc or research assistant, nobody can care about their project more than themselves, including me, because I can’t be the one pushing it forward. It really must come from them. So, trying to identify those traits in people will be the most rewarding but also challenging to tease out.
Are there big challenges in your field that you are interested in solving?
HIV is a tiny virus with not many genes and not many viral proteins, and yet we have no cure for it. So, all the obstacles that we have to vaccines, other strategies to eliminate these HIV reservoirs, which are incredibly persistent and long lived, are going to be challenges for cell therapies as well.
Our goal is to chip away at those core problems, which we’ve known about for a very long time, and leverage the expertise from others who’ve discovered those issues. We are going to try and solve the problem with our strategies.
What’s your hobby?
I love traveling. My partner Angelica and I classify vacations in terms of “passive” and “active”. We’re very excited to be headed to El Salvador, which will be our first passive vacation—a relaxing-on-a-beach vacation. Everything else we’ve done has been active vacations: going to Europe, trekking through the Dolomites, and hiking through Tuscany.
I also like to cook and have an outdoor pizza oven in which we make pizzas. So cooking, planning the menu, hosting dinners, and just having a good time with friends is our hobby.
Do you have any pets?
We have a dog named Archie. He is mostly pit-bull. He’s a rescue with a big heart—a big cuddler—but he’ll protect the house at all costs.
And then any books or movies you recommend for the summer?
I am currently reading The Wheel of Time series.