Tamara Hirsch
This profile is from the MRC Annual Review 08/09: A day of discovery. The review takes readers on a journey through a day in the life of the MRC, dropping in on people involved in MRC research as they go about their daily business to find out what they’re doing.
MRC industry CASE student at King’s College London.
Tamara Hirsch is an MRC-funded PhD student who has used her MRC Industry CASE Award to work on Parkinson’s disease with Proximagen.
Tamara Hirsch is reading up on the latest neuroscience research in the university library. It’s a modern glass and steel building set in the grounds of Guy’s Hospital and overlooks a quadrangle where students are milling around.
Tamara is a PhD student who is researching a potential new treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Her PhD is a little different to most – it’s an MRC-funded Industry CASE studentship. This means that as well as doing research at the university, she spends a portion of her time working in a pharmaceutical company and getting a glimpse of how industry works.
“I absolutely love science. But I’m interested in so many different things, so for me doing a CASE studentship allowed me to have interests in several different areas without having to put everything in one boat,” she says.
Conveniently, Proximagen, the company for which Tamara works, is just down the corridor from her university laboratory, because it’s a spin-out company from King’s College. She attends the company’s business meetings which is giving her an insight into the drug development process. “Proximagen has very nice new labs and new equipment, and the people who work there are very knowledgeable in their areas, so I get the benefits of that too.”
Tamara spends half her time in the lab, and the rest analysing results and reading research papers. Her research involves testing different doses of a new compound which holds promise for treating the side-effects of the standard Parkinson’s disease treatment.
Parkinson’s disease affects sufferers’ movements. It’s caused by the loss of cells in the brain that produce a molecule called dopamine. The most effective treatment available, a drug called L-Dopa, restores the dopamine to the brain and helps Parkinson’s disease patients to move normally again. But its side-effects are almost as bad as the disease itself, causing uncontrollable movements called dyskinesias. The compound Tamara’s looking at might eventually be used alongside L-Dopa to help patients move normally.
“One of the reasons I chose this PhD was because I wanted to do something that’s clinically relevant. There’s a long way to go yet, but it’s really exciting to be working on something that might ultimately provide a better quality of life for patients. I’ve met patients at Parkinson’s Disease Society symposiums, and it’s inspiring to realise they’re resting so much hope on us.” Doing a PhD with an industrial component has also made Tamara think more commercially about research. “I’ve learned that business and science can work together,” she explains. “Spin-out companies are beneficial for the university as a whole, because the university ends up having shares in the company, but the academics benefit from them too as the monetary gain goes back into their research.
“The best part of my job is knowing that when I come in, I’m making the decisions about what I’m going to do. My supervisor’s obviously giving me direction, but ultimately it’s my reading and my research that informs my daily activities. My hours can be quite unpredictable, but I don’t mind – I feel more motivated because I’m working for myself.”
Published August 2009