Summer Internship Program Returns This Year, Continuing a Tradition of Success

Butterflies in the stomach, a cold sweat, a feeling of dread: most of us know and fear the nervousness that accompanies public speaking. It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, to see apparently fearless Werner H. Kirsten student interns speak at NCI at Frederick’s WHK Student Intern Program Winter Poster Session. The event gave the dozen or so high school students a chance to present their hard-won research to NCI at Frederick staff. For many, it was their first time speaking about their projects in public.

Serguei Kozlov, Ph.D., doesn’t recall if it was he who first contacted clinician Udo Rudloff, M.D., Ph.D., or Rudloff who contacted him. He just knows that their resulting two-year collaboration, which recently moved a first-in-class drug for metastatic cancer toward clinical trials, is one of the best he’s ever had.

For Leonard Freedman, Ph.D., a lifetime in the sciences began serendipitously at Kalamazoo College, a small liberal arts school in Michigan. Freedman, who is Frederick National Laboratory’s new chief science officer, was drawn to the college’s strong science and premedical programs. However, he says many other subjects were equally attractive during his studies.

Ira Pastan, Ph.D., says the FDA’s recent approval of moxetumomab pasudotox, a drug that originated in his lab, wasn’t like “hitting a home run with the bases loaded, all of it happening in 20 seconds.” In fact, it was more like 20 years.

Attendees packed the Building 549 Conference Center for the National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research (NICBR) Winter Symposium, the latest in a series that aims to foster collaboration between its eight member agencies. Each symposium focuses on a specific theme, with the most recent event organized around novel therapeutics.