Throughout its 150th anniversary year, GSAS is foregrounding the voices of some of its most remarkable alumni and students as they speak about their work, its impact, and their experiences at the School.

Deborah Plana is an MD-PhD student in the Harvard/MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, where she completed her PhD in systems biology in 2022. Plana works to improve survival outcomes for cancer patients by developing new data analysis tools for clinical trials and preclinical experiments. She talks about finding the best therapy for each cancer patient, the importance of making her research available to the public, and her effort to address the shortage of personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Making Clinical Trials More Efficient

Clinical trials are the most expensive and highest-stakes experiments in biomedicine, and their results determine which therapies are ultimately used to treat patients. While a typical pivotal trial costs millions of dollars and enrolls hundreds of patients, its associated data will often not be made public, limiting our ability to learn from its results. In collaboration with my advisors Peter Sorger from Harvard Medical School and Adam Palmer from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we reconstructed otherwise unavailable individual participant data from clinical trials by using image analysis on published trial figures. We then developed methods to re-analyze these results at scale and help design more effective clinical studies. For example, we show how historical trial results can help infer drug efficacy from small sample sizes and ultimately empower researchers to run more efficient clinical trials.

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