Could a new approach to drug discovery lead to treatments for diseases like ALS and Parkinson’s?
The summer before her junior year at Princeton, Alice Zhang ’10 had an experience that would change the course of her studies, career, and life. As an intern in a National Institutes of Health lab in Washington, D.C., her hometown, Zhang worked on what she describes as a classic molecular biology project: pipetting and doing Western blots — a lab method used to detect proteins — to study brain cancer. “I wasn’t very good at Western blots,” she says, laughing. One day, a lecture by an Austrian physicist turned Zhang’s classic experience on its head. “He showed a picture of a network of hundreds of different genes. It was then I realized diseases are not caused by a single gene in isolation, but by groups of genes in complex biological relationships. I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” says Zhang.
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