A Word From: Matthew Stanton

Matthew Stanton, center, during an oral session coffee break at the 2017 RNA & Oligonucleotide Therapeutics meeting.

Nucleic Acid Therapies was among the first meetings to kick off our 2021 program of virtual meetings, and it marked the first year it was organized under this name. For six iterations dating back to 2010, it was known as the CSHL ‘RNA & Oligonucleotide Therapeutics’ meeting. The renaming, as Matthew Stanton (Chief Scientific Officer at Generation Bio and meeting co-organizer) explains below, was done to better reflect the ever-evolving field. The scope of the 2021 meeting was broadened to ensure advancements in the field were captured.

Matt first participated in the 2017 RNA & Oligonucleotide Therapeutics meeting before joining its team of organizers in 2019. He returned as co-organizer for this year’s virtual meeting and the inaugural program under the new ‘Nucleic Acid Therapies’ name, and he’ll be back as co-organizer in 2023. We reached out to Matt to chat about this year’s meeting, the name change, and the virtual format.

Your meeting was renamed this year. Could you share the reason? Is it because the field has evolved over the past decade? Did the renaming change the meeting in any way?

You’re correct to note that the field is ever evolving so we wanted to broaden the scope a bit. There are two technical considerations that are somewhat unifying in this space: solutions to deliver nucleic acids and resolving challenges of innate immune stimulation. Those challenges exist regardless of whether or not the nucleic acid is a small RNA oligo, a large messenger RNA or even a DNA. Recently, we’ve expanded the topics covered at the meeting to include gene editing and mRNA vaccines, and we anticipate potentially layering in non-viral gene therapy as that field evolves. 

Are there other meetings similar to Nucleic Acid Therapies? If so, what sets this meeting apart from those meetings?

I think the annual Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society meeting is most similar in content. What differentiates the CSHL meeting is the setting first and foremost: This meeting is unique in attracting senior PIs through to students just starting their careers. It’s a small, intimate setting, and the informal, non-presentation interactions are what I have found to be the most satisfying. Staying on campus really makes for a wonderful experience, and I can’t wait to get back on campus in 2023!

Speaking of participants, who else would benefit from attending this meeting, and why?

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This meeting does a great job of covering what is most timely, with particular attention to data quality and interpretation, so anyone working in the field can benefit -- both academics and industry scientists. 

Thinking back on your 2017 and 2019 attendance at this meeting, what is your favorite memory of it?

The presentation Adrian Krainer gave in 2017 on Spinraza after its approval and how inspirational that was.

It’s safe to say that we all prefer in-person meetings but was there an aspect of the virtual format that you liked? Did the virtual format enhance any portion(s) of the meeting?

I thought the virtual format allowed many more participants from across the globe to join the meeting that normally would not be able to attend in person. I also wonder if the Q&A format of the virtual meeting—submitting questions via chat feature of Zoom--lowers the barrier to asking and results in more questions from those who are not “the usual suspects”. 

In the Q&A portion of oral sessions at our virtual meetings, participants submit questions via the Zoom Chat feature along with their career level and institution. The ‘barrier’, as Matt said, is lower than asking questions in a large auditorium that may be filled with senior scientists and luminaries. Furthermore, any questions not answered during a virtual Q&A can be discussed at our Discussion Zone, and they are also transferred to the meeting Slack channel where the dialogue continues. This format has evened the Q&A-playing field, resulting in noticeably more questions and active engagement by early-career researchers across many of our meetings.  

Thank you to Matt for sharing insight into Nucleic Acid Therapies, which returns to CSHL in March 2023. For information on this meeting, be sure to regularly check here. And for cutting edge RNA research next year, be sure to check out our Regulatory RNAs meeting.

Visitor of the Week: Modesta Akoth

Meet Modesta Akoth of Egerton University (Kenya)! She is a graduate student in the Protozoology and Molecular Biology labs within the Biotechnology Research Institute, KALRO (KARLO-BioRI). Modesta spent last week with us at the Proteomics virtual course, her first course at CSHL, the format to which she found “convenient in reaching out to a wider audience globally.”

Tell us about your research.
My research entails using proteomic approaches to identify the mechanism(s) of drug resistance in African trypanosome, the hematophagous parasite that causes sleeping sickness in man and Nagana in animals.

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
From the reported records on upsurge of drug resistance in African trypanosomiasis by other researchers as well as a gap identified from a related study by one of the students in our labs led to this area of study.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
The inspiration has been self-driven since I have always been enthusiastic about research. Dr. Paul Mireji, a senior research scientist at KALRO-BioRI has also been instrumental in my scientific journey.

What impact do you hope to make through your work?
I am hopeful that my work will identify potential target sites which will provide insight into the development of novel drugs. This will improve disease management hence, better quality of life among the affected marginalized population. 

What do you love most about being a researcher?
The ability to explore and discover something that can be beneficial if implemented is very fulfilling to me.

What is your key takeaway from the Course; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
My key takeaway from the course is to work with what works best for me because there will always be working environment factors to consider like the possible limitation in the equipment available. Also, ensure credibility and reproducibility of the generated results.

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering to participate in this course?
The course is very informative and has competent facilitators with vast knowledge in the area of proteomics, therefore, s/he should not be hesitant to apply if the opportunity avails.

What’s the most memorable thing that happened during the Course?
The prompt elaborate responses by the lecturers towards the questions raised as well as being able to cover almost all aspects of proteomics within four days was remarkable.

Modesta received financial support from Regeneron to cover her course tuition. On behalf of Modesta, thank you to Regeneron for supporting and enabling our young scientists to participate in training courses where they expand their skills, knowledge, and network.

Thank you to Modesta for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Image provided by Modesta Akoth

A Word From: Charla Lambert & Stephen Matheson

The CSHL Scientific Writing Retreat is a four-day writing workshop offered annually in the fall at the stately Banbury Center. Guided by their main principle that “there’s no good scientific writing, there’s only good writing” the retreat aims to provide its participants with expert feedback on their specific writing project, and the environment to “get away” and write.

 This past April, Co-Instructors Charla Lambert of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and Stephen Matheson of Cell Reports organized the first-ever one-day virtual refresher course and reunion for their alumni. The refresher course was also attended by past coaches and followed by an alumni social.

A peek into “The Stephen Matheson Show” during the 2020 virtual edition of the writing retreat.
Image: Charla Lambert

We met up with Charla and Stephen to chat about their workshop, beginning the discussion with what inspired the format of the workshop.

Stephen: That is definitely a question for Charla because this is totally her invention. I think I’ve got this right, that the retreat was modeled after other programs at CSHL?

Charla: The format I dreamed up was patterned a little after the leadership workshop CSHL ran each spring for nine years. It was part didactic or lecture, part small group work, with lots of role playing and open discussions so people could bring their own experiences and get what they need out of the workshop. I also patterned the writing retreat after the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, which is an annual, week-long workshop taught by science journalists for non-science writers. I did that workshop while in graduate school and it was lectures in the morning, meetings with small groups, retreating to your rooms to write something each day, trying out different styles, getting lots of feedback, and revising. That totally informed how I wanted to structure the CSHL retreat, so people had good chunks of time to be able to work on their own.

Given the high volume of applications this course receives, this question might be unnecessary but I’ll ask it anyway: Did you for notice a need for this type of workshop?

Charla: There was definitely a need for this kind of training, this hybrid between teaching good writing principles and just letting people get away from their lives to focus on what they’re writing. And specifically, there was a need at the postdoc and junior faculty level. Postdocs in particular tend to be forgotten by their universities, so this kind of program serves a unique niche.

Stephen: The need for scientists to learn how to write is something an editor like me knows painfully well. Charla didn't have to convince me of the reasons to have a scientific writing retreat!

The Scientific Writing Retreat has been offered in-person every fall since 2015 and virtually in 2020. Excluding the workshop last year, how has it changed over the past iterations?

Stephen: We changed how we cover writing for non-expert audiences. In 2015 and 2016, we worked with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which runs great programs in science communication for scientists. They helped us with a lot of things, then we struck out on our own and designed our own module in 2017. I do a lot of writing for general audiences; I’m skilled at it and Charla is too so we’re qualified to do it. We also added new coaches like Jackie Jansen who have a lot of experience in this area.

Charla: What we’re trying to do is not necessarily teach people how to write or speak to a lay audience in general, but how to write for non-experts in very specific areas where scientists have to do it: Grants, abstracts for some journals, faculty websites, things like that. How you go from being a scientist to a skilled writer for a lay audience ended up being too much to accomplish in one evening. So we focused it to something more manageable and accessible.

Stephen: I’ll add that we’ve done this more and more empathetically in recent years. One of the hardest things you can ask a scientist to do is to talk to a person outside their field about their work. It’s also one of the most important, I think. And it calls for a little bit of empathy.

Charla: Before, we would just tell the trainees what they were doing wrong without acknowledging that writing for non-expert audiences is a really hard task. It’s really hard to talk about your own science, which you live and breathe, in a way that is accessible, understandable, and exciting to someone who’s not in your field. Injecting some empathy into the exercises to explicitly acknowledge that has helped some of the trainees work through the mind blocks they had with this kind of writing in the past.

In addition to one-on-one time with the various coaches, the trainees break into smaller groups. Do these groups form randomly or do you break them up using certain parameters? If so, is it based on field of research?

Sign-up board for one-on-one time with the various writing retreat coaches.

Charla: That’s another big change that we made. The first year of the retreat, I tried to accept applicants so the small groups contained people in the same discipline. The reasoning was that it might be important to have someone in your discipline in your small group to help work through very specific, technical passages. By the second year though, it was apparent that it was much more valuable for people who were working on the same thing to get together in small groups. Postdocs working on fellowship applications, people working on manuscripts that are computational, people working on manuscripts that are experimental, R01 grants, faculty job applications, etc. Everybody comes to the retreat from some area of biology and we group them together not necessarily on discipline, but rather what they’re working on. I think it’s worked out better: Once a person hears feedback from people in their small group and some of the coaches about potential issues with their writing, they can start to recognize that issue in their own writing.

Stephen: I’ll echo that and I’ll give a specific example. In my group once, someone brought a paper they were drafting. The introduction described two kinds of disease: inherited and sporadic. I know what ‘inherited’ and ‘sporadic’ are, and so does the person who wrote it, but another very smart person who wasn’t a geneticist didn’t and asked, “Now, what is ‘sporadic’?” It stopped all of us.

Charla: That’s a good question.

Stephen: Then we all realized, depending on the audience (which is one of the biggest questions a writer has to ask when they’re writing anything), you might have to stop and tell us what sporadic means. There’s a little piece of jargon that a smart person caught and, had we all been geneticists, there’s no way we would have thought of that.

I like how we’ve tweaked it though. We get feedback from students and we consider it very carefully. So the retreat changes a little every year. And it should, right? I like that. I’m proud of that.

Can you share some insight into what you look for when reviewing applications and choosing the next crop of trainees?

Stephen: We do have a particular demographic in mind, and it’s not just anyone who’s a scientist. This retreat is designed and optimized for postdocs and junior faculty.

Charla: One of the other big filters I use when reading applications is: Does an applicant have something they’re working on? I will usually filter out somebody who just wants to come and learn good writing, but doesn’t have a piece they’re actively working on. But someone who wants to learn how to write well and can also describe a manuscript they’re struggling to draft, or a fellowship deadline they’re working toward, that’s the kind of applicant I look for.

Stephen: Some people might legitimately want to participate in the retreat because their English is developing and they want to strengthen their English writing skills. Unfortunately, if they’re not already a fluent English speaker, this retreat won’t be appropriate for them.

Charla: With that said, there are plenty of people who participate in the retreat but are not native English speakers, because that’s the state of science: It’s very international. Past participants have been from institutions across Asia, Europe, North and South America. We just look for people who are reasonably fluent in English so they can focus on communicating their science, not necessarily struggling with their English.

The CSHL Banbury Conference Center provides the perfect setting to “get away” and write. But add snow and an endless supply of snacks and hot beverages into the mix? We’d be hard pressed to imagine an even more ideal place to work on a writing project (and what the 2018 retreat participants were treated to)!
Image: Charla Lambert

How is this retreat different from other writing workshops?

Stephen: Are there any?

Charla: I think the niche for this is the career-level we target, and the fact that people spend large blocks of time working on something that is their own.

Stephen: When I first told my colleagues at Cell that I’m going to be part of this, every single person reacted with “Oh that’s great! How often do they do it?” When I told them the retreat is held once a year, they responded with “Well that’s not enough!” So there’s a strong sense among myself and my colleagues that this so clearly meets a basic training need. It’s not fair to ask mentors to do what we’re able to do -- we can concentrate resources here that no postdoc mentor can do at any big lab. I’d like to see it reproduced actually, and used on a couple of coasts.

Charla: We’ll go national.

Stephen: I mean it’ll be franchised, obviously so.

Charla: One of our guiding principles is that there’s no good scientific writing, there’s only good writing. We focus on good writing principles in general, and how they apply in different contexts for different writing projects. So it’s not how to become a savvy grant writer for the NIH, and it’s not how to get a paper published at Cell. It’s not that kind of retreat. It’s more about how to become a good writer and will you leave after 4 days making significant progress on something you’re working on. I think that makes the retreat very different than a lot of other workshops people might take at their home institutions.

Last question: Does the course have a trainee success story?

Charla: In the first year, we had a trainee who was almost a mid-level PI and not a native English speaker. She had one R01 application rejected and this was her make-or-break point: if her next application wasn’t funded she basically had to leave her institution. She worked side-by-side with one of our coaches, Sydney Gary, and her proposal ended up being funded.

Stephen: One year, one of the students went to three coaches in a row, showing us her abstract. I don’t know if she was testing us.

Charla: She was collecting data.

Stephen: I was the last one and when I was done she said, “Wow. That’s really impressive. I showed all of you my abstract and you all made the same suggestions.” It’s gratifying when people realize there’s actually a well-defined ball of knowledge, expertise, and skill that they can acquire and actively work on.

Many thanks to Charla and Stephen for taking the time to speak with us about their workshop. The Scientific Writing Retreat will be held again in November so if you are working on a writing project and find yourself “stuck,” be sure to check out this year’s course. Charla and Stephen are welcoming applications until September 13, 2021.

Class of 2015

Class of 2016

Class of 2017

Class of 2018

Class of 2019

Visitor of the Week: Jackson Tonnies

Meet Jackson Tonnies of the University of Washington! A member of the Christine Queitsch/Josh Cuperus lab in the Department of the Genome Sciences, the graduate student joined us at last week’s Plant Photobiology – ISPP 2021 meeting. At his first CSHL meeting, Jackson presented a poster entitled “Synergy between functional elements drives activity of light-responsive enhancers”.

Tell us about your research.
I currently work on understanding the rules that regulate DNA expression in crop plants. Recently, I have been focused on picking apart a few pieces of DNA that help plants respond to light.

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
I decided to go into plants because I want to help ensure the food supply continues in spite of future changing climates.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
Before college I wanted to work in solar power, battery creation, or biotech with an emphasis on agriculture as those were the areas that I thought to be important. I chose plant biotechnology because I like studying plants the most.

What impact do you hope to make through your work
By illuminating regulatory rules in plants my research will enable improved crop breeding and reduce the land acreage required to feed the world’s population.

What do you love most about being a researcher?
The best part of being a researcher is the ability to continue to learn and have access to those who are also passionate about what they are studying.

What drew you to attend this meeting?
Finding and connecting with researchers with a deep knowledge of light responses in plants.

What is your key takeaway from the Meeting; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
The key takeaway is that light response is a multifaceted, deep area of study. I learned a lot about the players on the protein side of plant regulation and will try to use this viewpoint to inform my genomics analysis in the future.

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering to participate in this meeting?
I would recommend trying to balance focusing on the speakers that most interest you with exploring areas of the conference that are outside of your usual interests. It can be daunting with the number of talks/posters but it makes for a great collection of cool science.

What’s the most memorable thing that happened during the Meeting?
I really enjoyed the session on optogenetic tools. It encouraged me to think about new ways that these tools could be used. Tools such as green light receptors and systems that ignore day/night cycles open up a lot of possibilities in plants.

Thank you to Jackson for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Image provided by Jackson Tonnies

Visitor of the Week: Eman Helmy Thabet

Meet Eman Helmy Thabet of Alexandria University where she is a lecturer in the Medical Physiology Department, a member and researcher in the Centre of Excellence for Research in Regenerative Medicine and its Applications (CERRMA), and helps run the experimental animal facility. She joined us at the virtual Mouse Engineering Minicourse from June 15th to 18th. This is her first CSHL course experience and it “was more than what [she] had envisioned. [She] got introduced to many concepts of genetic engineering of which [she] was unaware.”

Tell us about your research.
Currently I work on the isolation of cardiac stem cells, the precursors of beating heart cells, from mouse hearts. By exposing them to different conditions and testing their regenerative abilities we aim to understand how they can be used to treat heart diseases.

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
I was always fascinated by stem cells and thanks to the multidisciplinary nature at CERRMA, I am able to research the ability of germ cells to regenerate postnatally and preserve ovarian function and then switch gears to another dogma of cardiac stem cells and the challenges of their isolation and therapeutic potentials in ischemic heart disease.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
To start with, I have always been supported and encouraged by my parents to pursue excellence in my scientific career. My first professional inspiration in research is former PhD supervisor and now current PI, Professor Radwa Mehanna. Dr Mehanna is a professor in the Medical Physiology Department and also runs the CERMMA lab. Her passion for stem cell research is contagious to those around her and is what spiked my curiosity for stem cell research. Dr. Mehanna’s leading personality and team spirit attracted me to shadow her and absorb as much of her knowledge and expertise. I was blessed and privileged to have her as my PhD supervisor, whom without  I wouldn’t have graduated. Dr Mehanna is, so far, the only PI I have seen who completes all the administrative work, funding applications, and gets her hands wet in the lab by conducting cell culture experiments and mouse dissections herself.

Excited and eager to learn more, I then spent a year at the University of California, San Francisco on a Fulbright Scholarship and meeting Professor Diana Laird was the ultimate takeaway of my adventure: she steadily walked me through a period of profound growth in my researcher career. Through our weekly meetings, she introduced me to a great deal of good science. I learnt how to think critically, develop out-of-the-box ideas (wacky science!), and how to self-learn new techniques and improvise during challenging situations; such as lab shutdowns during the pandemic. More importantly, I learnt “the art of making mistakes.” Dr. Laird always had a way of reshaping situations so that all experiences became learning opportunities and never failures. Her continuous one-on-one mentorship throughout my stay at her lab was a treasure. Professor Laird will remain an inspiration that will continually fuel my research career for years to come.

What impact do you hope to make through your work?
I would hope to contribute to generation of new cell lines or mice at our facilities that in turn would greatly impact our research and open new opportunities for us and future researchers.

What do you love most about being a researcher?
That I get to play around and create science. I am always excited by new ideas and techniques, and very eager to try them.

What drew you to apply to this course?
I knew nothing about mouse genetics. I gradually started listening to webinars on the JAX website that I found to be very helpful and introductory. But I hoped to learn and understand more so I am able to manipulate mouse genomes and produce genetically modified animals to model numerous diseases.

What is your key takeaway from the Course; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
Some of my key takeaways were constructing alleles, creating reporter lines or mice, getting to know more about CRISPR and its applications and, lastly, troubleshooting some of common scenarios that can happen during breeding and colony management and might be puzzling to researchers.

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering to participate in this course?
Get acquainted with the helpful websites and databases provided in advance by the course instructors, read some basic mouse genetics, and hop on!

What’s the most memorable thing that happened during the Course?
One of the course instructors is my former PI, Diana Laird. I loved reconnecting with her and remembering how pleasant it was to meet with her weekly (as much as it seemed stressful at the time!). Also loved seeing my former lab members, Bikem and Eliza (who would occasionally Slack me when I needed to get to a breakout room and was lagging behind :)).

Thank you to Eman for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Image provided by Eman Helmy Thabet