How Northwestern Shaped the Lives and Careers of the 2020–21 Northwestern Alumni Medalists, with Senior Vice President of Research–Biology at Genentech, Andrew C. Chan ’80, ’80 MS

CAT RECKELHOFF: Welcome to Northwestern Intersections. On today's special episode we will be highlighting the recipients of the Northwestern Alumni Association's highest honor. The Northwestern Alumni Medal celebrates alumni who have had a transformative impact on their field, who have performed exemplary volunteer service to society, or who have demonstrated an outstanding record of service and support to the University.

This year's honor was bestowed to four industry leaders in the fields of public health, biotechnology, global business and retail: Judy Belk, Andrew C. Chan, Christopher B. Combe, and Gordon Segal.

This episode features excerpts from interviews conducted with the alumni medalists in January of 2020.

Andrew C. Chan is senior vice president of research–biology at Genentech, a biotechnology company that works to develop medicines for people with serious and life-threatening diseases. Chan is an accomplished immunologist and biotech researcher who co-invented a drug for the treatment of multiple sclerosis.

ANDREW C. CHAN: So I was born in Hong Kong when it was still a British colony and my parents came to the United States when I was seven primarily because they wanted greater educational opportunities for all of the children. So I grew up pretty much in Southern California, in Los Angeles, and I went to high school at University High School in Irvine, California. So my interest in chemistry actually originates from my dual interest in both science and medicine. And in high school I had a terrific science teacher, Jane Shannon, who let me futz around in the laboratory. And so by playing in the laboratory and doing crazy experiments, I further evolved my interest in chemistry as opposed to the other biological sciences. My interest in chemistry really was because I was interested in problem solving. So in organic chemistry, the puzzle was always, how are you going to synthesize a particular molecule? So you go through these various synthetic reactions and it was a puzzle. So in the end, my interest in problem solving and puzzles resulted in my first scientific major, which was chemistry.

Northwestern has always had a top 10 chemistry department. So first it has excellence in the major that I was interested in. Northwestern is a research institution and because I was interested in research that significantly increased my interest in NU. Third was that we had a teacher who had graduated from Northwestern, Karen Spiros, and who was part of the Northwestern alumni association, and by hook and by crook, she convinced many of us that Northwestern was the place for us. It was also 2000 miles away from home and an opportunity to become a little bit more independent. And finally, Northwestern provided me with a financial aid package that made it affordable for us. When I was finishing high school, I was interested at having a very broad spectrum type of education so Northwestern provided both a bachelor's of arts curriculum, which allowed me to be able to also take classes way beyond just the sciences and chemistry, but at the same time had outstanding chemistry and other integrated sciences that allowed me to excel in the science.

I came from a middle class family, my dad is a structural and civil engineer, my mother's a teacher. I was the first of four children in the family to go to college. At that time, Northwestern, while of course it's much less expensive than it is today, was substantially expensive in terms of its tuition. So the financial package that Northwestern was able to put together for me, which was a combination of grants, loans, and scholarships, really was a very critical factor as we decided whether I was going to go to a UC school, the University of California school or Northwestern.

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Because I was interested in research, I actually discussed with many professors at Northwestern the opportunity to be able to enter their laboratory and Dr. Joe Lambert was kind enough to take me in when I was a sophomore and that allowed me to have really three complete years of research as an undergraduate. Now that continued experience in research is absolutely critical because in the coursework you're just exposed to laboratories. Laboratory courses are either you know four hours during a week and you may have experiments that go on for a week or so. But that's really not research. The lab courses teach you techniques that allow you to be able to build a foundation and your expertise. So being in the laboratory for a continued period of time allowed me to actually see what the research life was actually about. It allowed me to not only participate in research, but also see the research that was going on with graduate students, with postdocs and visiting scientists.

And hence, you know from that experience as well as from my experiences when I was at Washington University School of Medicine as a faculty member, understanding what a research career really meant was actually critical. About 10 years ago, we began to fund a program that's called the Lambert Fellowship Program and what this program does is it allows undergraduates to have a continued multi-year exposure to a research project of their choosing. And by doing this, our hope is that the students will really have a much better understanding of what a research career entails. Now that does not mean that they had to go into research, but our hope was that by gaining this experience, the students can now make a much better informed choice as to whether they wanted to pursue a research career, whether that's a doctorate in chemistry or other fields or medical school, or an MD PhD combined program or other things that they ultimately decide to choose to.

Dr. Lambert was a great proponent of undergraduate research. You know he had many, many undergraduates in the laboratory, despite the fact that we usually are just painting the butts in the laboratory. And so because of that enthusiasm, many undergraduates flock to his laboratory. So from my class of chemistry students, there were three undergraduates from my class that were all participating in research and Joe's laboratory. And again, it was an enthusiasm for science and his willingness to tolerate all of us in the laboratory at the same time that made us flock to his laboratory.

I've had many, many great inspirational mentors and leaders that I've been fortunate to be exposed to, just to name a few, when I did my MD PhD work at Washington University under the tutelage of Dr. John Atkinson, he is an exemplar physician scientist. He ran a basic science laboratory where I was fortunate to be able to study in his laboratory and he is an outstanding physician rheumatologist and that probably is part of the reason why ultimately I became a rheumatologist also. During my postdoctoral years, I studied under Art Weiss at the university of California in San Francisco. He is another exemplar physician scientist who really excelled in basic science and he inspired me to really focus on studying the basic scientific mechanisms by which immune cells function.

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My parents of course are extremely impactful in determining my career as well as my life planning. They ingrained in me importantly the value of learning and education. So my parents really led by example. My father while he was working as a civil engineer continued his education and ultimately got a master's in structural engineering. My mother taught high school and at the same time at age 50 returned back to school to become an engineer and then had another 20-year-long career as a civil engineer. My parents imprinted in all my brothers and sisters the value of education, so all my brothers and sisters have gone on to advanced degrees in a variety of different fields.

When I entered Northwestern, I was fortunate enough to have a sufficient advanced placement credits as well as college courses that I'd taken when I was in high school that transferred. So Northwestern was extremely flexible and accommodating to ensure that I could pursue any line of education that I wished and I entertained whether I would get a second bachelor's degree potentially in one of the social sciences, but in the end, because of my interest in research and Dr. Lambert's willingness, I actually, I pursued then a combined bachelor's, master's degrees in chemistry.

So because of my interest in science—so this is a combined MD PhD program—a six year program where I became extremely interested in the area of immunology, how the immune system regulates and maintains one's health and how when dysfunctional it can cause inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. So I picked the laboratory of John Atkinson to study in, he is an exemplar physician scientist and a rheumatologist and he was interested in studying... and his research focus was really on studying how certain compliment proteins, these are proteins that are important in immune protection are actually synthesized in the body.

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I really wanted to see my science impact patients. And that is the mission of the biopharmaceutical industry, to take basic science observations, to be able to translate them to either have a far greater understanding of human disease or to discover and develop a therapy that can impact and help patients. So ultimately it was my desire as a physician and a scientist that prompted my transition to Genentech. So my transition from Washington University to Genentech, again, is a matter of life circumstances, alright? So I happened to have a number of colleagues who had made a similar transition from academia to Genentech and after many, many visits to Genentech, I felt that the science is terrific, the colleagues are phenomenal, the resources are bountiful, and the desire to be able to translate basic science discoveries into transformative therapies was paramount. So I wanted to be part of that mission and Genentech was a terrific place for us, for me to be able to go to make it happen.

So in my current role, I oversee the biological areas of research that we do at Genentech, so this covers the areas of oncology, infectious diseases, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases and neuroscience. We have departments that are led by outstanding investigators in each of these fields and hence every day I learn something really, really cool. Our mission is to develop transformative therapies and I've been very fortunate to see the progress and participate in a number of these particular programs. So one of the first programs that actually originated in my laboratory here at Genentech that ultimately led to the discovery and development of a drug that was just approved in 2017 a humanized anti-CD20 antibody called Ocrevus that is approved for the treatment of both relapsing and progressive forms of multiple sclerosis.

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So in the work that we did with Ocrelizumab or Ocrevus, there was a very, very eye opening events that I still remember to this day. So I had just seen the clinical data unblinded and I was walking back from another building across the street thinking to myself, the entire field is wrong in that there's a lot of data and clinical data that demonstrates the T cells are very important in multiple sclerosis and many therapies have been utilized and developed to target T cells in multiple sclerosis. But all the, but the scientific paradigms really did not suggest that B cells had an important role in multiple sclerosis. And yet when I saw the clinical data of the impact of Ocrelizumab had on patients with multiple sclerosis, I realized that the scientific paradigm was wrong. And as I was walking back from the meeting, I was really thinking how can we now model back in animal models the importance of B cells in multiple sclerosis by which we can better understand the disease as well as develop additional therapies that are even better than what we have today.

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So that adventure was daunting and rewarding, and the rewarding part is really seeing how the clinical development informs how we understand the disease, the drivers of human multiple sclerosis, and what can we bring back to the laboratory to better understand additional therapies that are needed for treatment of multiple sclerosis.

So my own laboratory at Genentech still is very much focused on understanding how changes in our immune system can predispose you to autoimmune diseases such as lupus. So by understanding how these cells may be dysfunctional, our hope then is we will then be able to develop targeted therapies to re-correct those systems. My clinical specialty is rheumatology and I have seen patients suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, I've seen patients pass away because they have lupus and kidney failure and brain failure. So developing therapies that can change the course of these therapies that can change the course of these diseases and have significant impact on patients is really a very important thing for me to do. My research focus presently is to understand how changes in the immune system may result in disease. And by understanding the drivers of these diseases, we may well be able to develop targeted therapies that can correct these abnormalities and be able to save patients' lives.

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My involvement in the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute actually originates in the mid 2000s and it was really my desire to help Northwestern accelerate and translate basic science discoveries into either diagnostics or therapeutics to help patients. One of the unique strengths of Northwestern is its outstanding basic science departments and basic science research. And yet we know that translating basic discoveries into the clinic is fraught with failure. So we as part of the board with experts in many, many different fields across the industry meet two to three times a year, we try to help the faculty translate and provide input in how these particular discoveries might well be able to be translated into the clinic. The Institute has grown substantially over the last 10 to 15 years. The Silverman Hall has now just celebrated its 10th year since its building. It has grown to eight core labs. These core labs are very important because they provide the faculty and the students and the staff cutting edge technologies to implement and execute their research programs. It is a wonderful interdisciplinary program that involves many, many departments in the over 60 primary faculty members. And the translation of science into impactful therapies really is a team effort and that is what the CLP really is focused upon, is to bring investigators in from multiple disciplines to be able to allow them to translate and accelerate the discoveries into people.

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So there were two major takeaways that I got from my Northwestern education. The first, which I realized at the time, but which has grown in importance over my career, is learning how to think. With our courses, there's a lot of content and there's a lot of knowledge, but the ability to be able to think clearly and integrate information rapidly is something that many professors at Northwestern started when I was a college student. So the ability to think clearly, to integrate information as it evolves and it be able to evolve one's own thinking and working paradigm is very, very essential for success in many, many different fields.

The second, which I did not quite understand when I was a college student was the importance of the environment of an academic institution. So it's not about Northwestern's name, it's not about its endowment, it's not about the buildings, it's not about the beach and the beautiful Evanston. It's really the ability of Northwestern to continue bringing in world renowned researchers and teachers, out of the box thinkers and outstanding students who are committed to learning that make Northwestern a special place. And Northwestern over the, you know, hundreds of years has continued to be able to do an outstanding job in bringing the top in every field together on campus and that environment is absolutely critical for its present success and its future success.

Major reason why I continue to be invested in Northwestern is because Northwestern invested in me through it's financial aid package, through Joe Lambert taking me into the laboratory, through Northwestern's flexibility for me to... and accommodating me in a combined bachelor's, master's program. It has allowed me to flourish as a student. So it is incumbent in all of us to give back to the institutions that are invested in us, so the next generation of students and scientists can benefit.

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So the advice that I have for aspiring scientists is that science and research is a life-long endeavor. It is not a sprint. It's even longer than a marathon, so make sure that you're pursuing an area that you're truly passionate about because if you love what you're doing, you will do great things.

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CAT RECKELHOFF: Thanks for tuning into this special episode of Intersections and congratulations to our four Alumni Medalists for this incredible and prestigious honor. If you missed the President's Alumni Panel, we've included a link to the recording in the show notes. Hear President Morton Schapiro lead a discussion with the Alumni Medalists about how the University shaped their lives and careers. To our alumni listeners, if you know an alum whose life, work, and service truly exemplify the ideals of Northwestern University and deserve recognition for their accomplishments, please go to alumni.northwestern.edu/medal to access the form to nominate them; we will also include a direct link to the nomination form in the show notes.