On October 28, 2015, I walked from our lab in the Groningen Research Institute of Pharmacy to the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG). In this hospital, close to its side entrance, I met up with a young woman. She would help me with transfering approximately 1,000 blood samples from the hospital’s sample storage facility to our department’s freezers. This transfer probably does not sound very spectacular, but it was a big deal for me and my PhD project, and I remember that I was quite excited that day. However, I was not as excited as I would have been if I knew back then what I know today.
Let me take you to the Autumn of 2015 when I just entered the second year of my PhD. In that period, I was working on an analytical method for a protein called IGF1. This protein is a growth hormone and plays several important roles in health and disease. There were already methods available for IGF1, but concerns with regard to their reliability had been raised in the years before. These concerns set the stage for my first PhD project, and I was eager to develop a reliable alternative to the available methods.
At that time, we were not the only ones in Groningen interested in reliable IGF1 measurements. A doctor within the UMCG had a particular interest in this protein as well, and he mentioned to us that he had a set of samples in which he wanted to have IGF1 measured. We were quite enthused upon hearing about his interest as we wanted to show that the new method would perform well when being applied to a large (>1,000) set of samples. A collaboration between his group and our group was consequently established during a joint meeting in October 2015, and one day later I walked to the UMCG to pick up the samples.
My method was, however, far from being ready back then, and it took me until May 2016 to finish it and to demonstrate its technical soundness (by means of a fixed set of experiments which is referred to as ‘analytical method validation’). It then took me one week to measure all samples thereby yielding IGF1 levels for all of the patient samples.
The data I obtained in May 2016 would eventually lead to an analytical publication which was published in May 2017 (and which is probably the publication I am most proud of, thus far) and also to a clinical publication which was published last week (!). Why did it take this long? Well, I simply did not know how to handle the clinical data. My capability of handling analytical data was one of the reasons why my PhD supervisor hired me in 2014, but no one would have hired me back then to process clinical data as I lacked relevant expertise. At present, I would still not advise people to hire me for such a project, but I can proudly say that I have learned a lot in the past years, or at least enough to get a paper published in a clinical journal.
Key to this publication was the help I received from a PhD student working in the group of the doctor. She took me by the hand from day one, and she introduced me to the field of ‘epidemiology’ (which is the name of the corresponding field of expertise). Admittedly, she could have done the work herself and get an article published many years earlier, but she wanted me to learn to do the work myself. Needless to say, she was very patient with me.
As time passed by, our supervisors wanted to see results which we presented to them in their preliminary form. And even in this form, results indicated that we had stumbled upon something interesting. Many other medical doctors and researchers were subsequently involved in the project to get a better understanding of what we had exactly found. Our small-scale collaboration thereby matured to multi-department collaboration which represents one of the most valuable learning experiences of my PhD project.
This collaboration has been a fruitful one as well, in particular from the perspective of my personal life and my professional life. For example, this doctor and one of the coauthors on the paper were willing to spend their precious spare time two weeks ago to help me with the article revisions that were needed to get our work published. My epidemiology mentor furthermore was willing to do some final layout checks for me last Monday which I could not do that day because I was on a hiking trip in Cabo Verde. At last, my PhD supervisor and the doctor made it possible for me to get a position and develop a research project in Geneva, and I even dare to say that I would not have been able to continue my academic activities if they had not been there for me.
Now, let me remind you that these and many other good things started with a seemingly boring meeting near the side entrance of the UMCG. I am so glad that I could have this meeting, because it led to me building a great network as well as me joining an amazing research group in Geneva.
analyzed-by-frank.com 