An elusiveness surrounds the word “nanoparticle.” Of course, the literal definition is quite obvious— a very, very small particle. But a true understand- ing of its applications remains hidden in years of high-level scientific study. I walked into the cafeteria in the St. Raphael annex of Yale-New Haven Hospital for an interview with Nicole McNeer, MD/PhD ’14, knowing little more than that she works with both nanoparticles and children. Other than that, I knew a fancy publication had put her on a prestigious list, one that I think most people on this campus either secretly or not so secretly hope to top one day soon—Forbes’ 30 Under 30.
Using nanoparticles, McNeer helps find cures to childhood diseases, focusing on pediatric cancers, cystic fibrosis, and inherited anemias. She told me she was flattered by the award, but with a certain sheepishness: “It’s a little bit embarrassing,” she said. “There are a lot of people who are deserving, and with anything that’s as subjective as this, it’s five percent what you do and 95 percent luck.”
But McNeer’s “five percent” is certainly impressive. And she’s been at this for a while, working in medical research labs since she was 14. After receiving her undergraduate degree in Physics from Harvard College in 2008, she entered Yale’s MD/PhD track to complete a doctorate in Biomedical Engineering. At Yale, she began researching gene modification, developing HIV treatments. Her cutting-edge research uses nanoparticles to edit the human genome. After completing her PhD in 2013, McNeer chose to stay at Yale for a pediatric residency, spending her sixth year in New Haven in both the lab and the exam room, focusing on childhood diseases.
As prestigious as the 30 Under 30 title is on its own, I felt compelled to really understand why McNeer’s research is so groundbreaking. It turns out McNeer attacks a universal and fundamental question—how can we cure children of life-threatening diseases?—from an interdisciplinary perspective, separating her from her peers. She has worked in three different labs at Yale to study genetic cures for childhood diseases. She first worked with Dr. Mark Saltzman, focusing on drug delivery, then with Dr. Peter Glazer, on genome manipulation. McNeer then moved on to work with Dr. Marie Egan, combining methodologies learned from Saltzman’s and Glazer’s labs to apply her research in a clinical setting. “She has more energy than just about anyone I have ever met,” said Egan, “and usually gets more done in a few hours than most of us get done in a week or two.”
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McNeer centers her work on a claim that, at first, seems unlikely—“A majority of pediatric cancers are actually curable,” she said. It’s this opportunity for progress that compelled her to stray from her physics, engineering, and HIV-related research—all fields she has explored in the past.
One of her goals is simple: to make treatments less painful for children to undergo. McNeer got to know a number of her patients well, and she began to question the treatments that target disease symptoms without eradicating their causes. Often, these treatments tend to be painful for patients. “What patients go through to be cured is really heartbreaking,” said McNeer, who is especially sympathetic towards children—because, she said, they neither understand nor have much agency in selecting the treatments they receive. And so McNeer strives to “come up with more targeted treatments, to work in a more exacting way.” She wants to improve upon symptom-targeting cancer treatments that have become standard in hospitals.
McNeer still has ways to go in the medical world before accomplishing these goals; she hopes to finish her residency training in the next two years. She will balance this with her research on targeted chemotherapy, which she plans to explore in a lab of her own. She sees this interplay between research and clinical commitments as critical—and being a young intern has given her great access to young patients. Being under 30, it seems, has its benefits.
“As interns, we are the lowest on the totem pole, but we are also the ones who spend the most time with patients,” McNeer said. “We get to know families well. We see kids throughout the entire process of their diagnoses and treatments, and hopefully their recoveries. It can be both humbling and rewarding to see people through their hospital course.”
McNeer explains that failure has been critical to directing her research. “Even the bad experiences and outcomes, patient deaths, unfavorable diagnoses—even those can be very rewarding experiences in learning from families,” says McNeer.
So her clinical practice feeds into her research, which will hopefully benefit her patients in the long-run. Her former boss, Saltman, commended McNeer for this holistic approach and “her uniqueness in her ability to excel simultaneously in so many areas.”
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There is, of course, a toll to all this work. She readily admits it. “I know that I don’t have the greatest work-life balance,” McNeer said. McNeer is married—to someone who works nine-to-five at a small hedge fund in Greenwich. “I guess I’m glad that one of us has a normal person’s schedule,” she said. Hers is less than normal and involves many days that last at least 12 hours.
Still, she said, she met her husband the first year of college, when he was 19 and she was 16. “We sort of grew up together. He’s always known that work is important to me and he’s always been very supportive of that,” she said.
As McNeer heads home, she drives me back to Yale. Before we leave the parking lot, she gets a call from her husband. She tells him to buy a piece of fish and some vegetables. He’ll pick them up and she’ll make dinner.
As we drove home, I guess I realized the specifics of her research were not as salient as I had once thought. Her real secret, it seems, is an artful balance. A balance between optimism and scientific practicality, between bench work and logging hours at patients’ bedsides. And maintaining that delicate balance—between innovative nanoparticle therapy with massive potential to change the world and the micro work of clinical consults with her patients at Yale New Haven—are essential to her continued success, at 27, at 30, and beyond.