Viviana Cortiana, Med Student at Universiy of Bologna and Armenise-Harvard Fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“This summer, I had the fortune to return to Boston and continue on-site work at the Sethi Lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Coming back felt meaningful, both to continue working on last year’s project and on a newer one that has significantly fueled my scientific curiosity and interest in the rising incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) in young adults.
What fascinates me most is how this trend represents the need for public health, preclinical science, and clinical research to communicate and work as one continuous flow. Only when these synergize can we develop timely, evidence-based, and actionable strategies for urgent public health challenges like early-onset CRC. Working on this topic has also become, for me, the meeting point of the different parts of my journey that beforehand felt parallel, profoundly influencing how I see my role in the future.
During the fellowship, we worked on understanding how diet influences CRC initiation and progression using genetically engineered mouse models. It was encouraging as much as unsettling to witness that a high-fat diet accelerates tumor growth in derived organoids, supporting deeper mechanistic studies on how dietary patterns contribute to CRC risk.
I am grateful to the Armenise Harvard Foundation, Harvard Medical School, for believing in young scientists, and to everyone in the picture below, people who make the lab a second family and a place where I feel I can grow as both a physician and a scientist.
I am especially grateful to Nilay Sethi for being a role model with his work and values and for supporting me throughout this journey, and to the brilliant scientist (and photographer as well) Yingbo Huang, for his constant guidance. And thank you, Thejus Thayyil Jayakrishnan, for the possibility to connect lab research with clinical care, giving me even more purpose, and for being an example of how an oncologist can support patients both medically and humanely throughout their journey.
I would like to thank you and all those who believe in me and are encouraging me to try to do the same, and from whom I am learning not only science, but also the value of providing and receiving mentorship, regardless of which stage of our journey we are in.
I look forward to continuing to learn and commit to this work and, hopefully, generating and testing hypotheses that can contribute to the efforts addressing the alarming rise of early-onset CRC.”
More posts featuring Viviana Cortiana.