Meet one of our early-career scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute: Alejandro Lillo, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Elena Pasquale, PhD. Lillo studies a family of protein receptors to uncover a new treatment approach for cancer patients.

When and how did you become interested in science?
When I was 15 years old, my parents told me that my mom was suffering from multiple sclerosis, a disease with no cure. At that time, I was a very good student interested in math, physics and biology.

I decided to focus all my efforts to become a scientist and be able to help people in the same situation. Even though I was frustrated, I tried to concentrate on positive things I could do to help people and contribute to new solutions as a researcher.

What are the key areas of research you focus on?
I am studying a small family of receptor tyrosine kinases called erythropoietin-producing hepatocellular receptors or EPH receptors. These receptors are highly implicated in different physiological and pathologic processes, including cancer.

Other experts have investigated these receptors as individual units, but we now know that these receptors can interact with each other to form groupings known as heterocomplexes. I am studying these heterocomplexes as part of a new potential therapeutic strategy for treating cancer.

What motivates you about your research?
Sometimes doing science can be frustrating. But I really love what I’m doing. Even when my hypotheses are wrong, I always try to think about why I got certain results and what I can learn from them.

I also reflect on why I chose this career, and it helps me to remember that I can benefit others by contributing to finding treatments for diseases with no cure.

What do you like about working here?
Most important to me is the family-like environment that we have here. Everybody is so collaborative and so helpful. Every time that I need something that we don’t have at the lab, I send an email and in five minutes I have a solution. We are collaborating with a lot of groups. And it goes both ways, so whenever other labs need something from us, we do our best to help out.

Also, something that is especially important for us postdocs, we have many different workshops, seminars and other resources to help us grow in our careers. And it is important for me to mention all the core facilities we have as they have been so supportive.

Thanks to them, I’ve developed skills in confocal microscopy, flow cytometry and mass spectrometry, adding to what I am learning inside the lab from my mentor.

What are your career goals?
I want to be a principal investigator in academia. I am building my skills in proposal writing, leadership, public speaking and other areas needed to successfully build and run an independent research lab.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not in the lab?
I love going to the beach and going hiking. And I enjoy going to the gym. It helps me to deal with stress and maintain my mental health.

Also, I am a food lover. Experiencing different kinds of cuisine makes me happy.

Postdocs at Sanford Burnham Prebys are pushing the boundaries of science every day through curiosity, collaboration, and innovation. This series highlights their unique journeys, what inspires their work, and the impact they’re making across our labs.

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Meet one of our early-career scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute: Nilofer Sayed, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Debanjan Dhar, PhD. Sayed studies the progression of fatty liver disease to cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma to identify new potential treatments that could reverse or halt disease advancement.

When and how did you become interested in science?
Empathy for the sick led me to pursue a career as a physician in India. However, during my medical practice, I came to a point of understanding that I cannot help patients when existing treatment options are insufficient.

That insight led me to shift my gears and move towards a career in research to help find new therapies.

What are the key areas of research you focus on?
I work in a liver condition called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis, or MASH, which involves the liver getting fatty and inflamed. The problem with this condition is that if it’s not treated on time, then it can progress to a much more severe form. 

At this stage, healthy liver tissue is replaced by scar tissue. This impairs the liver and can progress further into cancer.

I’m studying ways to stop this progression into more severe forms of liver disease. My major focus is on a particular immune cell population in the liver called macrophages. By manipulating this cell population, I’m trying to alter the immune landscape of this disease and inhibit its progression.

This is becoming increasingly important as the incidence of MASH continues to rise. We need to be able to prevent patients from developing cirrhosis, liver failure or hepatocellular carcinoma. 

How do you think about translating your findings to advance human health?
I believe that what I am researching has great potential to one day reach and help patients in the clinic. Once we can clarify the targets and the mechanisms, we will be able to test peptides or small molecules that modify the targets in order to inhibit the progression of the disease.

We’re fortunate to have drug screening capability here at the institute. This makes us more confident in our ability to move things forward when we identify promising druggable targets.

What motivates you about your research?
The underlying motivation is to improve the lives of people that are sick. Because that is a long-term goal, though, I think it is important to have other sources of motivation that are more immediate.

Every day I wake up, I love heading to the lab to explore my ideas. As I plan and design my experiments, I’m excited to see what answers I get from them. Another fun part of being in the lab for me is troubleshooting. I enjoy figuring out what might be going wrong in experiments, not only for myself, but also for my fellow lab members or colleagues who are feeling stuck. I love the feeling of fixing something that isn’t working and getting the research back on track.

I also get motivated by attending as many of the scientific talks and seminars as I can. The speakers’ creativity and their meticulous experiments inspire me and provide insight into many areas of biomedical research.

What do you like about working here?
The work environment here gives researchers what they need to thrive. Collaboration is encouraged and the support that I get for my experiments from core facilities is wonderful.

I think Sanford Burnham Prebys has talented principal investigators that excel at generating ideas and guiding emerging scientists in the right direction. Also, this is a very translational research institute, which excites me because I know that what I achieve during my postdoctoral research has the potential of going forward and reaching patients.

This pushes me to work hard and accomplish something that can have an impact beyond scholarly publications by benefiting people.

What are your career goals?
I would like to stay in academic science and eventually run my own research lab that would focus on developing targeted immunotherapies for hepatocellular carcinoma.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not in the lab?
I love going to church and visiting people who are sick in their hospital rooms or in their homes to try and bring some cheer and comfort.

I also enjoy cooking and going on long walks to admire nature.

Postdocs at Sanford Burnham Prebys are pushing the boundaries of science every day through curiosity, collaboration, and innovation. This series highlights their unique journeys, what inspires their work, and the impact they’re making across our labs.

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Meet one of our early-career scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute: Ambroise Manceau, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Cosimo Commisso, PhD. Manceau studies pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma — the most common form of pancreatic cancer with only a 13% five-year survival rate.

When and how did you become interested in science?
When I was very young, I was a bit of a nerd when it came to reading reviews of new scientific studies written for kids. Especially anything related to biology.

I lost sight of that interest at some point in my teenage years. I tried going into computer science, but I realized very quickly that it wasn’t a good fit for me. That forced me to do some deeper self-reflection about what I really wanted to do, and that brought me back to biology.

I started studying biology at college, and everything just clicked into place. I really found my way when I went to college.

What brought you to the Commisso lab at Sanford Burnham Prebys?
I have an uncle that I always admired who is a researcher here in California. From talking with him, it sounded like a great place to work and live as a scientist. When I was an undergraduate in France, I decided to do a four-month internship abroad in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California.

I absolutely loved it, and I knew I wanted to return when I could. Because you can finish your graduate school program a bit faster in France, I decided to go back to France to earn my doctorate and then apply for postdoctoral positions in Southern California.

I was looking for labs conducting interesting research in the region, and that is when I found the Commisso lab. It has been a terrific fit for me.

What are the key areas of research you focus on?
My broad focus is on metabolism and organelle biology in pancreatic cancer. My main project looks at macropinocytosis, which is a cellular process that allows cells to gather extra resources from their surrounding environments. Pancreatic cancer cells use this process as an adaptation because they exist in an environment where resources are scarce, and they need to find fuel for their expansion.

I study the contents taken in when pancreatic cancer cells contort their cell surfaces to create pockets called macropinosomes. By analyzing every single protein located on macropinosomes, I found that calcium and zinc transporter proteins present in macropinosomes also are required for macropinocytosis.

These proteins have never been targeted before in pancreatic cancer. By continuing to research them, our long-term goal is to use this strategy to cut the nutrient supply to tumors and see if we can inhibit tumor growth.

What motivates you about your research?
One thing I enjoy is how you adjust your hypothesis based on what you are learning from the experiments. You need to adapt your hypothesis as you gain knowledge, but you don’t always realize it because it can happen one little step at a time.

Then you look at your project a year later, and it is very satisfying to see how much it evolved and how much you changed your mind by following the data.

Also, now that I have attended pancreatic cancer conferences and met with physicians and patients, I have more appreciation for the need to improve upon available therapies.

What do you like about working here?
The people at Sanford Burnham Prebys embrace collaboration. They also are very curious, knowledgeable and kind. With the core facilities, workshops and other opportunities for learning and networking, we have so many resources available to us.

Then add on top of that the location in San Diego, which is a great hub for biomedical research and the biotech industry. And we have the Southern California coast, culture and weather for when we aren’t working.

Have you had an influential mentor?
In addition to my uncle, my thesis mentor and principal investigator back in France were very influential in my professional development. Here, I feel like Cosimo is doing everything he can to get the best out of me, including supporting me to go to workshops and conferences.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not in the lab?
I’m a bit addicted to rock climbing, and San Diego is a great place to be a climber. I have access to an incredible indoor climbing gym, but I also can go climbing outdoors within a 15-minute drive from where I live.

I also play a bit of tennis, go running and relax at the beach. And I’m painting some, which is something I used to do on rainy days in France. We don’t have many rainy days here, though, so I always want to be outside.

Postdocs at Sanford Burnham Prebys are pushing the boundaries of science every day through curiosity, collaboration, and innovation. This series highlights their unique journeys, what inspires their work, and the impact they’re making across our labs.

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Meet one of our early-career scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute: Dana Mamriev, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Maximiliano D’Angelo, PhD. Mamriev studies the gateway between the DNA stored in the cell’s nucleus and the rest of the cell to better understand how changes in this junction contribute to cancer development.

When and how did you become interested in science?
As a teenager, I was very into sports, and I was endlessly fascinated by the human body. I wondered what makes an athlete faster, stronger or better able to perform under pressure.

I started digging a bit into aspects of athletic performance and realized how much depth there is to molecular biology. I began to see that there are different types of muscle cells, how food is broken down to lipids, carbohydrates and amino acids, and that we have different metabolic pathways.

That was the beginning of my interest in science. When I started college, I took a few courses in biology and chemistry. I was immediately hooked. Before long, I knew I wanted to get some hands-on experience in research.

What did you imagine you would be doing professionally, and how did it evolve?
Growing up, I was an athlete on the Israeli national team. I started racing kayaks. Later, I transferred to sailing in a two-person boat called a 470 because it is 470 centimeters long.

I raced in world championships, European championships, world cups and other events. It was fun, and I was quite serious about it until the age of 21 or so.

But even while training and competing, I was equally drawn to science. As an undergraduate, I joined a lab for what I thought would be a one-year research project on cancer and programmed cell death (apoptosis). I loved it so much that I stayed through my undergraduate studies, my master’s degree, and eventually my doctoral training. That experience cemented my commitment to a career in cancer research.

What brought you to the D’Angelo lab at Sanford Burnham Prebys?
What drew me to the D’Angelo lab was its focus on fundamental mechanisms that drive cancer. Nuclear pore complexes are central to so many cellular processes and understanding how they go wrong in cancer has the potential to open new paths for treatment. That combination of basic science and translational impact made the lab the right fit for me.   

During my PhD studies, my main project focused on breast cancer. So, I thought it could be a nice transition to study nuclear pore complexes in breast cancer. That ended up becoming my first project at Sanford Burnham Prebys.

What are the key areas of research you focus on?
Our lab studies the nuclear pore complex. It’s basically a grouping of 32 proteins that are embedded in the nuclear envelope dividing the nucleus from the rest of the cell.

It is shaped like a pore and acts as a gate that controls what molecules come in and out of the nucleus where we store our DNA. In addition to this role in transport, the nuclear pore complex has many other functions, including in the cell cycle, gene expression and chromatin organization, and more.

The levels of some of the proteins in the nuclear pore complex are known to be elevated in different types of cancer. I focus on studying these changes in the nuclear pore complex in breast cancer and in lung cancer. I’m trying to understand how these changes are contributing to cancer developing and spreading to other parts of the body.

What motivates you about your research?
I think my main motivation is that I really like what I’m doing It’s the thrill of discovery and the challenge of solving difficult problems. Research often feels like piecing together a complex puzzle. When the data finally come together, it’s deeply rewarding. I especially enjoy the moments when a stubborn experiment finally reveals something new; those breakthroughs make all the effort worthwhile and inspire me to keep pushing forward.

What do you like about working here?
We have a friendly and collaborative environment at Sanford Burnham Prebys. And we have many seminars that people attend and get to know each other, which helps with building collaborations. Also, the core research facilities here are top-tier and enable cutting-edge research.

Then you have San Diego as a hub for research, and especially here in La Jolla with all the great institutes around us. And we have all these biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies nearby as well. It is an outstanding place for scientists.

Have you had an influential mentor?
Throughout my training, I’ve had, and still have, the privilege of working with mentors who are not only accomplished scientists but also generous teachers. Each brought something different: dedication, curiosity, discipline and patience. Their examples have been a constant source of motivation in my career.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not in the lab?
I took up cycling after moving here and joined the San Diego Bicycle Club. I like to join their weekly rides, and sometimes I bike to work.

I started racing here as a cyclist. I’m familiar with racing in other sports, but racing in cycling was completely new for me. And I found it a bit funny that all the racing experience I have in kayaking and sailing is not helping.

I had to learn new strategies for when to conserve energy and when to go all out. I even got dropped from the peloton of competitors in my first race, so I’m learning the hard way. It just motivates me to better understand the sport, and to keep training and get better.

Postdocs at Sanford Burnham Prebys are pushing the boundaries of science every day through curiosity, collaboration, and innovation. This series highlights their unique journeys, what inspires their work, and the impact they’re making across our labs.

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Meet one of our early-career scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys: Alexandra Houser, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Shengjie Feng, PhD. Houser is a structural biologist studying ion channels to better understand how the brain works.

When and how did you become interested in science?
A family friend of ours was a scientist. When I was younger, she would take me to the woods near where my dad worked as a mechanic to look for owl pellets and put the tiny skeletons inside the pellets back together.

When I ended up going to community college, I found the science courses were the most interesting. I earned my associate’s degree in biology and then transferred to a university.

What did you imagine you would be doing professionally, and how did it evolve?
I am always in awe of people that knew what they wanted to do their entire lives because I had no idea.

I remember back when I didn’t even know that research happened on university campuses. I was really surprised when people told me I could go work in a lab. I remember asking what class to sign up for and they said I could just go talk to a scientist if I was interested in what they were doing.

Soon after that, I started working in a lab on motor proteins such as kinesin, which I found fascinating. When I was getting closer to graduating with my bachelor’s degree, my mentor said I had a lot of potential as a scientist and that I should go to graduate school.

I told her that I couldn’t afford grad school, and she told me about tuition remission and getting paid a living stipend. I thought, “Oh, my god, I have to do this!”

Over time, I’ve gotten more and more into biochemistry, and now I’m here working as a biochemist.

What brought you to the Feng lab at Sanford Burnham Prebys?
I learned about her research because we were working in similar fields. In grad school, I worked on sodium ion channels. Shengjie works on potassium ion channels.

I used to host an ion channel journal club in graduate school. I gave a presentation on one of her papers and loved it and then saw that she was starting a lab.

Sodium and potassium ion channels play a big role in the brain. What generates the electrical signal is the difference between sodium and potassium inside and outside the cell. It’s the balance of those two ion channels that turn neurons on or off. 

In graduate school, I basically looked at how neurons turn on through sodium ion channels, and now I’m looking at how they turn off via potassium ion channels.

What are the key areas of research you focus on?
Someone once told me that some people prefer areas of science that are broad in scope and where you have to make more generalized assumptions, and others like areas of science where you can unequivocally determine if something is this or that.

I am in the unequivocally this or that camp. I do what I like to call protein selfies. When you take a selfie, you take a bunch of pictures and pick the best one. With a protein selfie, I take more than a bunch. A few million more.

Because proteins are so small, I need to average these millions of pictures together to see what it looks like. And then with an image of the structure, we can get ideas of what the protein does and how.

What motivates you about your research?
I’ve worked a lot of jobs in my life, but this feels different. Sometimes I just stay late because I’m excited and it’s fun. I may be seeing something for the first time that no one else has ever seen.

When you’re doing basic research, sometimes you just find really cool stuff!

What do you like about working here?
I love the support that’s here for postdoctoral researchers. Honestly, it’s been almost universally positive. I don’t think that is true everywhere.

The postdoc community here is so active organizing standout events such as family day and holiday gatherings. We have tremendous opportunities for workshops and industry tours.

I’ve also enjoyed events put on by the Workforce Engagement & Belonging team, especially this summer’s book club. It was great getting to meet people from administrative offices and other labs, all the different people that make up Sanford Burnham Prebys.

How do you hope your work will advance science and/or improve health?
As a basic scientist, I feel like my research will help other researchers make an impact in the future.

I’m doing everything I can to explain a protein’s structure and how it influences function. I imagine someone years from now will use my science to develop a new drug for this protein target. My work can help them understand areas where a drug could bind the protein, for example.

What are your hopes for the next stage in your career?
I’d really like to go into industry. It often goes that the more successful you are as a principal investigator, the less time you can spend at the laboratory bench conducting experiments.

And I love being at the bench.

Have you had an influential mentor?
My undergraduate mentor made a major difference in my career. I had a lot to learn. I didn’t know anything about academic science. He was really good at pushing me but also giving me room to fail.

He taught me so many things that I use all the time, such as how to focus on the big picture of your science. In structural biology, you can analyze your data for five years. Understanding your big question helps you know when you’ve reached the resolution needed to answer this question. Then you can move forward with the next question.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not in the lab?
I’m a big reader. I read books all the time. My fellow lab members make fun of me because even when I’m eating lunch, I’m always there with my books.

I also like cooking dinner together with friends and going to the beach with my son and my dog.

Postdocs at Sanford Burnham Prebys are pushing the boundaries of science every day through curiosity, collaboration, and innovation. This series highlights their unique journeys, what inspires their work, and the impact they’re making across our labs.

Explore the Full Series