Elgene Lim
Elgene Lim
My name is Elgene Lim, I’m a medical oncologist, but I’m also a PhD student at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.
I’m working with the breast cancer laboratory run by Jane Visvader and Geoffrey Lindeman. And my research topic is: The elucidation of the human mammary epithelial hierarchy and comparing it to various types of breast cancer.
The project that I have been working on for the last three years has been utilising fresh mammary tissue from donors, or patients of the hospital and I study the mammary tissue by breaking it down into the multiple cell types that the breast is composed of and interrogate each individual subtype separately. This is using a cell-sorting type of technology that is currently available. And my findings have compared breast tissue from normal women to breast tissue from carriers of a gene called BRCA1 gene, which predisposes them to breast cancer. I have found a cell population which is aberrant and abnormal in these women. These cells represent a likely target for cancer development in these women and these are therefore exciting findings.
Why is it important?
Doing a PhD has opened my world in terms of understanding the platforms that are available for analysing cancers such as the DNA profiling, the RNA, the protein analyses platforms. Certainly, with the technology that is currently available it’s going to be a lot more challenging, but certainly there are lot more other ways to study cancer. So certainly, with the advances in technology, I believe that our understanding of cancer will only escalate with time. It’s going to be a challenge to keep up with all of this. It’s a whole new lingo, a whole new skill set. I certainly think that there is a great need for either people to be able to straddle both the clinical and the basic research domains or for both groups actually work closer together. And if anything this PhD has taught me to appreciate work that gets done in a laboratory and through my career as a clinician, I will seek out groups and laboratories that I can work closely with.
I’m currently about two weeks away from handing in my thesis which is three and a half years from starting my PhD. I’m finalising my discussion chapter and handing in my thesis. At this point in time, the bulk of my work revolves around writing and editing any changes that my supervisors have made to the chapters that I have submitted to them and it involves minimal bench work.
Motivation
My main reason for doing a PhD, was because I realised that good understanding of basic science is an essential component of oncology today. Oncology is not only about being able to treat patients, but also about being able to understand new treatment paradigms. So whereas in the past a lot of treatment paradigms were empiric and were focussed around different ways of combining drugs, or giving drugs at different doses the oncology of today really focuses upon the identification of biomarkers and targets within the abnormal cancer cells. And in order to do that, one really needs a good understanding of basic science which is what lead me back to the lab to do some studies in mammary gland development - being an oncologist with a slant to looking at the implications of these findings in cancer development.
Choosing a supervisor..
Other than the project itself and probably equally important as the project itself are the supervisors of that project. It is important to know what they are like, as best as you can, even before joining the lab and certainly I had the opportunity to speak to other PhD students that preceded me in the lab to find out more about the supervisors. I think that the supervisors would be one of the key ingredients to a successful PhD.
Choosing a lab..
I guess I started off in a very narrow field in that I was only interested in cancer-related research and therefore that limited the numbers of laboratories that I decided to interview at, which was ultimately only three. So that certainly helped, because I had an idea of what I was interested in and what I would like to do.
Being an oncologist, I have been interested in cancer and I guess there are a number of laboratories, all of which are associated with Melbourne University, that I interviewed with at the very start. But the opportunity to be involved with what I consider to be some ground-breaking work, lead me to pursue my studies in this particular lab (WEHI, Jane Visvader and Geoffrey Lindeman).
Having completed a PhD and having a medical background, I think the options are vast and many and certainly I didn’t appreciate this even when I started to do a PhD. I recently returned from a postdoctoral tour of both the UK and the US and I had six job offers in the various countries. Certainly having a formal scientific training has opened many doors, even in clinical research where this is viewed very favourably.
Taking up the job offers?
Oh, absolutely, for me it is an excuse to move overseas, more than anything else, but it will certainly give me the opportunity to build upon what I have learnt in Melbourne and with the aim of picking up new skill sets, which hopefully I can bring back with me and contribute to the scientific community here in Melbourne, or in Australia.
Postdoctoral vs clinical path..
So being a dually trained clinician and scientist I will be focussed on clinical research, but keeping with the theme of my PhD, really looking at identifying new molecular targets in breast cancer.
Highlights..
The science is certainly one thing but there’s a lot more to it than that. Having the opportunity to continue with my clinical practice although in a much less involved basis, because I only do one clinic a week now, that has given me the ability to see the possibility of how I can translate what I’ve done in the lab to the patients that I actually see. So, certainly it’s given me a lot more hope and optimism for the patients that I see, but also it’s the whole environment, having made friends in the lab and people I got to know through my PhD journeys, those will serve as the positive memories that I will carry with me into the future. The research is just one part of it.
Challenges..
So I started my PhD when I was 33 as a mature-aged PhD student, having completed my clinical oncology training, so certainly moving back from a working environment to a laboratory as a student was a big challenge. And being a clinician moving back into a lab was challenging because I really had to learn how to walk and crawl in the lab and that was challenging and there was also a significant culture difference between working in a hospital and working in a lab, but in hindsight all of these experiences are both challenging and valuable because I see myself as wanting to engage with both the clinical and scientific community in the future and having the opportunity to experience that first hand would allow me to do that in a much more efficient way.
Lab vs clinic...
I guess one example is that we deal with patients on a daily basis. Although a lot of our treatment goals are long term, we do get the day-to-day satisfaction of getting a patient over an infection or getting a word of thanks from patients or family members and that is certainly something we don’t get in science. This publication (link to Nature Medicine publication) is the accumulation of three years of hard work, not only by myself, but by a team of researchers and there certainly weren’t many Eureka moments during my PhD to keep me smiling or to keep my enthusiasm going. As apposed to climbing small hills, it was like climbing Mt Everest in terms of research and I found that tough, but it’s also given me the discipline to stick to something that I believe in, in the hope of getting results in the long term as well.