GRADflix, hosted by University of Waterloo’s Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs, gives graduate students the opportunity to showcase their research by creating a one-minute video or animation. This year, Waterloo Pharmacy MSc student, Norman Ly, won the 2024 GRADflix People’s Choice Award for his 'Immune system: How does cancer turn it off? 'submission.
Ly’s research focuses on immune checkpoint receptors, proteins, in the human body that prevent the body’s cells from attacking one another. In some cancers, the cells protect themselves by mimicking these proteins to control the body’s immune response, resulting in regular cells not recognizing them as a threat. Ly’s focus is to understand how one such protein, VISTA, shuts off our immune system.
Watch Ly's submission below.
When you’re able to understand the interactions and dynamics of the protein, you’re able to streamline the drug development process. My aim is to provide more information and resources for drug developers to target VISTA and to help the cancer immunotherapy landscape as a whole.
Norman Ly observing the VISTA protein structure.
Q&A with Norman Ly
UW: What is the aim of your research?
NL: Our body has immune checkpoint receptors that regulate our immune system. Cancer evades our natural defense system through expressing these immune checkpoint receptors. By understanding how they operate, we can better design drugs to target cancer cells. For my research specifically, I am investigating how VISTA binds to its partners to turn off our immune system.
UW: Tell us about your GRADflix experience.
NL: For scientists and researchers, the ability to communicate your research to a broader audience is extremely important. Making the video was challenging for me because I found it difficult to disseminate my research to a different audience, while using a different medium than I am used to. This experience showed me how important it is for researchers to aim to explain their work in an accessible way.
UW: What does winning the Gradflix People’s Choice award mean to you?
NL: This award means a lot to me. My research is fundamental and helps others understand the foundational blocks of our immune system to then develop stronger drugs. I feel very fortunate to have won and it made me realize how important this research is to people. Several audience members spoke with me after my presentation, it validated my research and has motivated me to continue doing what I’m doing.
UW: What is the key message you want people to take away from your graduate journey?
NL: At Waterloo we are exposed to computer science, even as life science students, in our undergraduate degrees. Rarely do we step into the computer science space, whereas math and engineering student do reach over and come into the field. As science students we should be braver and should step into the computational research space. While we may not have gone to Waterloo to code, we do have a research lens that can add a different perspective to this space. Merging the areas of research together in an interdisciplinary way really strengthens us as researchers.
Norman would like to thank his supervisor, Dr. Aravindhan Ganesan, research assistant professor at Waterloo Pharmacy and the previous and current ArGan Lab members for their guidance during his MSc. He would like to also thank ComputeCanada for their supercomputer resources and the Cancer Research Society Charlotte Légaré Memorial Fund for funding his research. Lastly, he would like to thank his friends and family for their support throughout his endeavours.