Exploring the World of Bioengineering: A Conversation with Wanda Janaeska
I get excited because I love the field that I’m working in and I didn’t know that I loved it until I was already in it.
Bioengineering is a blooming field, with advancements that can propel humanity to build safeguards against future health crises and enhance quality of life for everyone.
Wanda Janaeska, a Biomedical Systems Engineering (BME) student at the University of Toronto is making her mark on the field through extensive industry and research experience backed by sincere passion. She is currently doing her Professional Experience Year (PEY) co-op term at Kernal Biologics in Cambridge Massachusetts, as a Scientific Technician.
I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be, especially as someone who is very interested in pharmaceuticals and drug delivery and engineering.
Kernal Biologics is a biotechnology startup based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a large biotech hub. The startup designs and creates drug platforms that selectively target cancer cells, referred to as the delivery of onco-selective mRNA using lipid nanoparticles (LNP). To break it down further, mRNA is the instruction for cells to make a protein and it is delivered to cells using LNPs, which are essentially fat bubbles. Wanda further explained how the approach that Kernal Biologics has taken to mRNA delivery, in particular, is addressing the current challenges faced by many therapeutics modalities:
Using LNPs, we deliver mRNA that will kill cancer cells but not healthy cells. This is possible because only the bad cells can understand or ‘decrypt’ the mRNA we are delivering whereas normal cells can’t. This will then help with reducing the toxicity we currently observe with mRNA therapeutics out there with off-target effects. Also, the issue with a lot of drugs being developed right now is their current method of delivery or the drug itself gets cleared to the liver, so it has very minimal effect on treating the tumours. Aside from selective mRNA, we are also engineering LNPs that can selectively target specific organs and inevitably tumours so we can more effectively kill the cancer cells.
Contributing to the LNP Formulation and Immuno-Oncology Team, Wanda takes on tasks related to drug design, formulation, manufacturing, testing, and assay development. This unique experience of working at a fast-paced startup has proven to be a rewarding experience for Wanda.
Because I’m working in a startup, I get to wear at least fifteen different hats as opposed to working in big pharma, where you’re stuck doing one thing and that’s it. What startups actually teach you is how to handle high stakes experiments carefully and perfectly. […] It’s definitely good exposure for me into the pharmaceuticals industry and it’s letting me actually think of the implications of my work because these drugs are going to go into humans eventually. If I make a mistake, if I don’t do my experiments properly, and don’t have integrity in the things that I’m doing and actually take full responsibility, that can be fatal.
Can you tell us about your background and what initially inspired you to pursue a career in bioengineering?
Starting in the Engineering Science program at the University of Toronto, in her first year, Wanda was looking into exploring the fields of bioengineering and aerospace engineering through a summer research internship.
And so, I had a spreadsheet, I split the spreadsheet in half. One half for aero [aerospace engineering] profs and one half for bioeng [bioengineering] profs. […] That’s when I found out that I liked BME because I looked forward to reading those [bioengineering] papers a lot more and actually enjoyed it, and was literally smiling and giggling reading those papers versus picking up a paper on CFD, like computational fluid dynamics. No offense of course, CFD is important and is actually a big part of BME
In first year, Wanda’s dream lab, in her words “moonshot lab,” was a research internship at Professor Warren Chan’s biomedical engineering lab. Her journey to securing the placement supports the idea that curiosity and passion for learning in STEM can take an individual so far in this field.
I was on Twitter, X now, and I came across a tweet that said “Nano-bio journal club, come join us and actually listen in or chit-chat with the author of this paper.” […], It was called “The Dose Threshold for Nanoparticle Tumour Delivery.” I saw that and I thought “nanoparticle tumour delivery”? I knew nothing about it, but it sounded so cool and I was intrigued. But, in my head, I was like, “Okay, well there’s a high chance I won’t understand much but if I could learn one thing from this one hour and a half journal club, I’ll take it as a win.’”[…] I sat there until I understood one concept the speakers talked about — it was their rationale as to why gold nanoparticles were used in their experiments. Albeit, this was probably a piece of knowledge that is so simple to people in the field but to me it wasn’t. And that was literally the only thing that I understood from the entire paper and I didn’t pay close attention to the authors of the paper until much later. And then fast forward, this is me drafting emails now, […] and I looked at all of the BME profs and I listed them in terms of my interests in their research. First on the list was Professor Warren Chan. […] And then when I was drafting emails, I was like, “Time to read his paper and see what’s up,” and guess what, that paper that I read two months before, that I went to the journal club for, came out of his lab. When I emailed him I made sure to include “Hey, by the way, I also went to your PhD grads journal club and we read this paper and I learnt this.” […] 1 hour later, I sent that email, I got a response. And the rest is history.
Could you describe some of the most exciting projects or research you’ve been involved in within the field of bioengineering?
“One of the reason, nanomedicine is so important, and is blooming is because the idea is, if you can tune or engineer a pharmaceutical or a drug small enough that it can penetrate a bunch of places then there’s a high chance that it might get to where you need it to go.”
In the summer after her first year at the University of Toronto, Wanda was a research assistant at Professor Warren Chan’s lab.
“I got to look at how nanoparticles enter and interact with our cells and I got to learn from a bunch of cool techniques, wrote more code than I wanted to. […] I had really good mentors in the lab, Jamie and Wayne. Jamie is actually an EngSci grad too. We worked on answering basic bio questions regarding how nanoparticles interact with cells.”
Following her second year of university, Wanda pursued another research internship at Professor Omar Khan’s lab; which was her first introduction to the world of LNPs.
I worked on engineering next-gen nanoparticles, lipid nanoparticles, for various mRNA-based therapeutics. […] I dabbled in a lot of mini projects but the main question they tried to answer was: is there any way we can reduce the way the immune system responds to our LNPs by changing the different compositions in a lipid-nanoparticle. […] It was essentially like a puzzle. […] This combination, do you think it will work? Okay, let’s test it out. And carrying that experiment from start to finish. […] I actually got a lot of independence and a lot of skills. In Professor Khan’s lab, I had very present mentors and colleagues who helped me through many troubleshooting experiments. I worked closely with a PhD student there, Julien and my co-intern Tobi who is now actually working full-time at another biotech startup 5 minutes away from Kernal.
Wanda attributes her positive research experiences to her position at Kernal Biologics today.
It actually helped me for PEY because I was fortunate enough to be able to collect some tools through my research experiences and thus have those skills down pat that I can now apply in an industry setting. Also, a lot of companies now work with LNP. So if you have LNP knowledge, you’re marketable and are a very attractive candidate. If you have those skills you might just be in demand.
While reflecting on her past experiences, she emphasizes the importance of allowing yourself to enjoy the process of learning in STEM.
Everyday, I like the idea of not knowing what I might find out that day, while knowing exactly what I’m gonna do. While I know how to execute the experiments, I don’t quite know the outcome. For me, the unknown of the outcome, while people might think it’s scary because while it might fail, I think it’s super super exciting. That’s why everyday, it didn’t feel like work. I had the most fun failing but also learning so much.
What advice would you give to folks who are just starting to consider a career in bioengineering or STEM in general?
My advice actually merges the advice Professor Chan and Professor Khan have given me in the past. The field of bioeng [bioengineering], the field of STEM, it’s massive, it’s crazy and there’s so many things that could happen and things that you could study. The way that I see it is, in undergrad, your job or essentially your goal is this: you have a toolkit, you have a toolbox, there may be some things in it, there may be nothing in it. But your goal in undergrad, should be coming out with a filled to the brim toolbox, however that is. Your goal is to gather as many tools as you can along the road and learn as many things as you can along the road, so that by the end of undergrad, you can stand and say “I like this.” […] You’re only doing yourself good by gathering as many tools as you can, learning as many things as you can, from all the different subsets of bioeng, so that at the end you can make an informed decision in terms of what you want to do moving on. […] It also does make you more marketable for whatever it is that comes next, because it means that if you can pick up new skills as easily as you can, you can learn anything. But something I also want to mention is, having good mentors in your corner is so so important. Finding the people who will stand by you and help you navigate the intricacies of academia and beyond is integral. The impact my mentors have had on me is something I am eternally grateful for because I wouldn’t have learned what I know now and have the skills that I have now without them.
Wanda’s journey is undoubtedly inspirational and empowering to all of us. Her story is proof that a burning interest to learn new things, dive into new experiences, and dedication to your professional growth can make for an exciting and rewarding experience in the field of STEM.
To me, STEM is all about exploration. It’s doing new things and making sure that you keep going even when you fail because that means you get to learn new things and I think that’s the beauty of it.
