Michelle Moyal, DVM (Host): Welcome everyone to the Cornell Veterinary Podcast, where we do a deep dive into the discovery, care, and learning that happens at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine. I'm Dr. Michelle Moyal, a General Practitioner and lover of all things Cornell VET, and so we're here in this episode talking to another amazing Cornell faculty member, Anushka Dongre. Dr. Anushka Dongre. I am very excited you're here and I'm, I'm going to get started by reading your just, you know, really simple bio. I mean, you haven't been doing anything with your life. You've just been hanging out, clearly not doing much, but Dr. Dongre is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences.

She obtained her bachelor's of science and master's of science degrees in microbiology from the University of Mumbai, India, and her PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She did her postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. Oh yeah, no, you haven't been doing much.

You've just been, or, and MIT, excuse me. You can feel free to elaborate further. I would love to hear more. Welcome. I'm very excited you're here.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Thank you so much, Michelle. I mean, thank you for having me. This is my first podcast, so I'm really excited myself.

Host: Same girl, same. And your hair looks great. I'm hoping my curls are really showing up on, on video. But we're going to jump right in if that's okay.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Sounds great.

Host: So, it's really important to me to kind of ask about people's origin stories. What made you decide to become a scientist?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, so it's a long story. As you heard from my bio, I'm originally from Mumbai in India. And I think that's where my passion and for science started. I just loved biology in school. I liked learning about it in the classes. And so there was like a natural affinity towards the sciences and, and wanting to learn more.

Host: Totally get that.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: It was just a thirst for knowledge and wanting to learn more that allowed me to, you know, get into science and think about science as a profession. You know, a lot of people told me I should consider being an M. D. or a doctor, because if you're good in biology, you're the first one. First thing that comes to your mind is maybe you should be a doctor instead.

But I was fortunate enough to have mentors who exposed me to the world of research very early on. And so my first experience working in a lab was when I was a master student and I did it in a, in a small lab in India. And that was, you know, my first experience working at a bench, holding a pipette, thinking about asking questions that are going to make a difference.

And thinking about how organisms just function, you know, the basic biology without thinking much about translation. And that is what sparked my interest in science. I took a class in immunology. Eventually, I liked immunology very much, and I thought I'm going to dedicate the rest of my graduate career towards learning immunology.

And so that's why I applied to graduate school in the United States and I got into UMass, Amherst and I joined Barbara Osborne's lab. She is an immunologist and she works on CD4 T cells and so I was studying the signaling pathways in the CD4 T cells to understand how they work and how they differentiate to form different types of T cells.

And that really gave me a very good understanding of immunology, you know, basic cellular fundamental immunology. And I was lucky to have a very positive and nurturing experience in Barbara's lab. And you know, there are very few graduate students who will say, Oh, I loved my PhD. It was the best thing of my life.

It's hard, right? But I'm one of you who can say that. And it's because of this wonderful experience and mentorship that Barbara gave me, that really cemented my love for science and wanting to do this for the rest of my life. And so then one thing kind of led to another. I did my postdoctoral work with Bob Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute at MIT.

And at the end of my postdoc, doing the work that I was doing, I think I was not ready to leave it just yet. The desire for learning more and exploring some of these fundamental questions just grew exponentially over time.

Host: We all do that, by the way. We all do that. As doctors, we're like, all I want to do is do this. And then you get there and you're like, but couldn't I do more? We love that. Here's what I recognize when I talk to amazing people at Cornell, just like you, I do catch a theme and it doesn't matter who it is. It's being drawn into science, like at a young age, even if you didn't think you were going to go into science full term. And then encountering someone who really allowed you to flourish and like develop your passion.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, absolutely. I, I mean, that's what happened to me. And, you know, I cannot stress the importance of having good mentors. You're going to need them throughout your life.

Host: Yes, across the board.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: I had good, teachers in school. I had good mentors in India when I was, you know, doing my master's thesis who gave me opportunities, who took a chance on me. And, I couldn't be more grateful for what they've done to me. And, and I seek out mentors actively, even now as Assistant Professor. You need mentors at every stage of your career.

Host: Oh, yes.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: I aspire to be a good mentor to my own students, and I think it makes such a big impact on what you do.

Host: This is just a little side note for students or young people out there. If you have a mentor and that mentor just you know, you think of them as a mentor, but maybe you don't really, like, work together like you thought. Maybe you're not thriving as well as you thought. That's okay. They might be able to help someone else, and you can find other mentors.

So I think sometimes we think, well, this is our person who committed to us, but we can help ourselves by finding our person just like you. We're very lucky. It sounds like you found two incredible labs and mentors in your career.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, and I would say more than two, but absolutely, my thesis advisor and my postdoctoral advisor were the two major players.

Host: Yeah. No, absolutely. No offense to the others that she didn't have time to mention.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Sure.

Host: I should, I'm leaning in, that's how much I mean it. So, you decide to be a scientist and it seems like your focus, not seems, I stalked your lab online, as one does, your focus is cancer, but you did study this immunology. So, where did you go from loving immunology to deciding that cancer research would be your focus?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, that's a great question, Michelle. So my lab actually works at the interface of both cancer biology and immunology, but you're absolutely right. I made that transition. I think it was just a series of events. I was at the right place at the right time. And the way I went about making that transition was, while I was doing my PhD, I mean, I love immunology, but I also took a cancer biology class. And I was fascinated by what I was learning and I thought at the end of my PhD when I was looking at options to do a postdoc, maybe I wanted to try something new.

Host: So you can do that. You can decide, like, you did your whole thing and you're like, I just want to try it. Like, you're not necessarily confined to your initial study, right?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: No, absolutely not. I mean, it's an opportunity to try something new and you're not committing yourself, right? If you like it, you can continue to do it. If not, you can go back to doing what you liked before. And so I didn't want to limit my options and I thought why don't I try doing something else and learning this other field of cancer biology that I was also interested in.

But at the same time, I like the immunology a lot. And so I thought perhaps the best situation would be to study both and be at the interface and adopt interdisciplinary approaches. And so I applied to Bob Weinberg's lab for a postdoctoral position and I joined his lab and started studying the EMT program, which was a major theme and continues to be a major theme in his lab.

 I'm very glad I got that opportunity because I came in as an immunologist and I had a very different perspective to the problem. And so this process of, you know, epithelial mesenchymal transition, which cancer cells adopt, was studied more in the context of, uh, what does it really do to the cancer cells?

You know, how do they become resistant? How do they metastasize? And because I came in with a background in immunology, I was curious to understand how does it affect the immune system? And at the time, we really didn't know a lot about it and, there's still so much that's left to learn. And so that's how I made the transition and it was the best thing I could have done for myself because it opened up all of these different possibilities for me.

Host: And you know, it's just a testament to say labs and science in general, they don't need someone always who has the same study. We want diversity in thought, like we want diversity of people, but we want it because of diversity of thought, diversity of how you approach problems. Just for our listeners who might not be familiar with all types of science, could you briefly, in like lay terms, just tell us what immunology is and what that fancy EMT concept is? Just like, so we're all on the same page.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, absolutely. And so, I mean, it's a very broad discipline, right? Immunology is the study of the immune cells in your body, but I can tell you a little about what we do. So we look at different adaptive and immune cells in terms of how we can use them to fight cancer. And so what happens under normal conditions, right, your immune system is designed to fight infections, whether it's a bacterial infection, a viral infection.

And so these, specific types of cells called the T cells get activated, and they are able to kill this pathogen, whether it's a viral pathogen or bacterial pathogen, and then their activity is regulated. So they're turned off and you don't have all of these, you know, unforeseen consequences. And so it's important to have that switch that regulates the activity of these T cells. Now what happens in the context of cancer progression is exactly the opposite. So you would want the immune system to kill cancer cells, but the cancer cells are able to evade the immune system, use immune surveillance or immune evasion strategies that basically turns off the immune system.

So now the immune system starts helping the cancer grow instead of shutting it off. And so my lab is focused, like many other labs, we're trying to use the immune system to fight cancer, which now brings me to the problem of EMT and what is EMT and, you know, how are we connecting these two ideas together?

So EMT is called epithelial mesenchymal transition or epithelial mesenchymal plasticity. And you can think about it as cells that change shape or think about cells being shape shifters. It's basically epithelial cells that are cuboidal in nature, so they're held together very tightly.

And when they activate this EMT program, they basically detach from each other.

Host: So they're kind of like bricks, kind of like tight together.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Sure, absolutely, cuboidal morphology, they're held by ectotherin gap junctions really

Host: Okay, so stuff is sticking them together tight, and then

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Just detach. And they adopt this more spindle shape, or what we call as a mesenchymal morphology. And, there are many EMT transcription factors and many, you know, other signaling networks that facilitate.

Host: Sure. Tons of stuff involved, yes, but ultimately they

Anushka Dongre, PhD: They detach,

Host: Change, detach and change shape.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yes, absolutely. And, it's actually not a binary switch that all epithelial cells become mesenchymal. They're in fact a spectrum of states. So you have cells that can co express both epithelial mesenchymal markers, we call it quasi mesenchymal, and there's actually this entire series of states.

So you can think about the EMT as you know, shapeshifters would probably be the best way to explain it to people who've never heard about EMT before as a series of cellular changes. And it's an epigenetic process, so cells changing their identity of

Host: I love, the screen just gave you a thumbs up, probably because I thought, I was like, that's great. I agree. That was, that was worth a thumbs up. So wow. So this is not just on off. This is maybe some on, maybe some off. Maybe some of them are on with some switches that tell them some different messages. So this is not straightforward. I love, we love this in science. This is great.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, it's not a black and white process, right? Like everything in science, right? There are layers of complexity.

Host: It just sounds so difficult. Yeah.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: And so, what's fascinating about cellular plasticity, EMT as a type of cellular plasticity, is it was actually not discovered in cancer cells. This is a process that is a physiological fundamental biological process. So for instance, it's needed for wound healing. It's needed for embryonic development. If you get a scratch on your skin, so the skin has epithelial cells. And if you have a scratch and you wound your skin, these cells activate the EMT program and they become mesenchymal and motile. So they're able to move across that barrier.

Host: Gotcha.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: So, this is a process that's actually needed for physiologic functions and it's hijacked by cancer cells to spread to different parts of the body. And so when cancer cells activate this EMT program, they acquire many characteristics that you would typically associate with aggressive cancers. So they're able to spread in a process called as metastatic colonization. They become resistant to treatments like cytotoxic therapy, chemotherapy, they adopt something called a stem like potential, so these cells are able to self renew, make more of themselves, make more of the other type of epithelial cells.

Host: Oh my goodness.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, so they gain a lot of characteristics that are associated with aggressive disease. My lab looks at these mesenchymal cells in terms of how they interact with the immune system. What are they doing to the immune system? Do these different cellular states really interact differently with your immune system?

Host: Wow. That's incredible. And I hope, you know, people listening or watching understand that I laughed because science is just, medicine is just not straightforward. And I think sometimes people think it is, but it really isn't. And the laugh comes from that like frustrated, like, oh, it gets so technical and so complicated.

This is incredible information, but it sounds like it makes cancer so, so difficult and so invasive. Like and evasive.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Absolutely. And it's, it's fascinating for us, right? Because it tells you, like, there is so much, even though the EMT has been studied for years, there's still so much that we don't know.

Host: Yeah.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: There's still so much that's left to learn. And, we're trying to adopt a very different approach to this problem by trying to look at it from an immunological lens. And, you know, the consequences of activating this EMT program are clearly very wide and very far reaching.

Host: Wow. I saw that the main focus seems to be breast cancer per your lab. Is there a reason why you chose to work on breast cancer? Is there something about the immunology aspect that lends to breast cancer being a good model for what you're studying? I was just curious.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Great question. One of the reasons why, well, there are several reasons why we're working on breast cancers, but I think one of the major reasons why is because we study the EMT and the immune system also in terms of immunotherapy. So immunotherapy is essentially activating your immune system to kill cancer cells.

And there are many different types of immunotherapies. So there's a specific form of immunotherapy called a checkpoint inhibition. And these are basically antibodies that can activate, inhibit negative regulatory interactions on T cells and activate them.

Host: Oh wait, could you translate that into, into plain language?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Sure. So as I was, as I was explaining to you before, like the activity of T cells is regulated, right? Once done their function, they have to be turned off. But in cancer cells, these T cells are just inactive because of the tumor's microenvironment microenvironment and what the cancer cell does to the T cell. So you need to activate them again.

And this is what the checkpoint antibodies do. They turn on, then they get them to kill the cancer cells. And this form of immunotherapy has actually worked very well for certain cancers. So for instance, you know, patients with melanoma or non small cell lung cancer, about 60 percent of them respond quite well to these checkpoint inhibitors.

But breast cancer patients do not respond as well. So the response rates for breast cancer patients to a particular form of this checkpoint blockade immunotherapy is about 15 to 30%. So you still have a vast majority of patients that are not deriving benefit.

So we call them the non responders. And this is one of the reasons why we want to work with breast tumors because we want to potentiate the response of checkpoint inhibitors.

 And you know, ask the question, how can we increase the fraction of patients who will derive benefit. And so there is an unmet need here and that is one reason why we want to work with these breast cancers. And then another reason is because as part of my postdoctoral work, studying the EMT, I made models that recapitulate these epithelial or mesenchymal state in murine breast tumors or mouse models of breast cancer. So we have mouse models of breast cancer that are either epithelial and or mesenchymal. So we have the tools to ask these type of questions. This is why it's a good start for us to work in this disease area.

Host: So is there just one type of checkpoint inhibitor?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: No, there are multiple forms of checkpoint inhibitors because T cells express multiple checkpoints. The ones that are studied very commonly, is anti CTLA 4 and, which the discovery of CTLA 4 and anti CTLA 4 by Dr. Jim Allison and Dr. Honjo received the Nobel Prize.

Host: Oh, just the Nobel Prize? Oh,

Anushka Dongre, PhD: And then we have PD 1 blockade, which is a different type of checkpoint inhibitor.

Host: So when you say non responders, does that mean that this specific type of breast cancer doesn't respond to any type of checkpoint blockade?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: So this is a great question. So the mouse model that we work with and the mesenchymal like mouse tumors are unresponsive to both forms of checkpoint blockade.

Host: Wow.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: However, it is a little different. In patients, there is a 15, like I said, there are 15 to 30 percent that do respond. They derive benefit from PD L1 inhibition, but the vast majority are unresponsive to either CTLA 4, PD L1, PD L1 blockade.

Host: Wow. So I'm so intrigued. When you do the research on the checkpoint inhibitors, are you also focusing or does someone else focus their attention on what might make the responders more responsive?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, so this is a major theme in my lab, and yeah, I'm so glad you asked me this question. This is a major theme in. So one of the things that we want to do is to ask, can we use criteria to predict whether or not somebody is going to respond, right? Because these inhibitors, like any other types of cytotoxic therapy, are associated with side effects.

And so a lot of things people in the field think about understanding before you administer therapy, is there any way to know are these going to derive benefit? And what are the criteria that you can use? And my colleagues in the field have really done phenomenal work identifying what these criteria are.

So for instance, if you have a tumor that has a lot of T cells inside that tumor, chances are it is going to respond well. But if you have a tumor where you don't see as many T cells, the T cells are excluded from the tumor, chances are it's not going to respond as well. So what we're trying to do is, I talked about epithelial mesenchymal plasticity, so we're trying to ask if the plasticity of the cancer cells can be used to predict whether or not somebody is going to derive benefit.

So rather than looking at the immune cells that regulate these responses, we're coming at it from the perspective of the cancer cells and see how the plasticity of cancer cells regulates these responses. And that is what we've been able to kind of phenocopy in a way with our mouse models.

Host: I think that that's so neat because I think sometimes people tend to forget when people are doing all of this amazing research that this can seriously have clinical ramifications. And that's really important to someone like me. You want to be able to tell someone before they take a medication that might make them ill or have all these side effects, whether or not it would work.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, absolutely. And that is the hope. The hope is to translate it to the clinic. Although we didn't start the study that way, that we started thinking about EMT just to understand the basic biology of how it affects the immune system. But clearly it has, you know, translational benefits. And the other reason why we think it's important to think about it from a translational perspective is we have seen differences in terms of the plasticity of the cells and how they respond to checkpoint blockade.

So for instance, in our mouse models of epithelial breast tumors, they do in fact respond to a specific form of checkpoint blockade called CTLA 4 inhibition and our quasi mesenchymal tumors. So this is the population that's activated the EMT program.

Host: Quasi. Okay. Do you see, I hope everybody's watching me glaze over as I hear all of this brilliance. She said she used a pipette before and I was like, pipette. Oh, okay. But people love that. Thank goodness for people like you.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Well, that's very kind of you to say. So back to the quasi mesanchymal tumors. They're resistant to checkpoint inhibition. And what's even more fascinating is if we mix the two cell types together, so we've made a third model, right? Because not all cancer cells, in a tumor are mesenchymal. There's heterogeneity, from the perspective of the cancer cells themselves.

Michelle Moyal, DVM (Host): So they're not all the same, essentially. There's a lot of difference for people listening like, and that's also what makes it difficult, right? To kind of target it.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Absolutely, because, you have all of these different cells, not just the cancer cells, but immune cells and a lot of other, you know, cells in the tumor microenvironment. And so as long as you have these mesenchymal cells in a mixed tumor, the mixed tumor is also resistant to checkpoint blockade, so epithelial on its own response, but as long as you stop spiking it in with the mesenchymal cells, the epithelial cells fail to respond.

So these mesenchymal cells are dangerous. As long as they're present in the tumor, the tumor as a whole is unresponsive. And

Host: Wow.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: So, this is what's fascinating for

Host: Just like, oh my god, that's so incredibly difficult and I know, and I'm, I'm gonna jump to other questions, but can I ask how, as a scientist, how does it feel sometimes to go in, into your lab each day and think, this is so difficult, how will I approach this challenge? Like mentally, how do you, there has, this is such a difficult challenge.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: It is, I agree with you, it is a difficult question. It was also an unexpected finding when we

Host: Yeah.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Mixed tumors, right? It was, this is not what we thought would happen, but it happened. And I'm glad it did because that's what prompted us to ask the next question is, okay, we know these mesenchymal cells are cross protecting the epithelial cells.

How are they doing that? And it is a difficult challenge, but I do think it opens up the possibility of thinking about it some more and coming up with novel solutions to the problem. If there were answers to everything, there would be nothing left to learn. We view these difficult questions as learning opportunities, and think about, you know, what else can we do?

How else can we approach these problems to eventually solve them? And because of this unexpected finding, we started asking, well, what is it that the mesenchymal cells are doing? And, we found one target, it's the name of the molecule is CD73, the name doesn't matter, but essentially if you perturb the expression of this particular enzyme on the mesenchymal cells, we can sensitize them to some form of checkpoint inhibition, but we don't know the mechanism, we don't know the mechanism.

Host: Gotcha. So essentially you found this unexpected surprise that if, if this mixed tumor, it can essentially like confer like protective properties, so nothing affects it. Now you're using something amazing to sensitize them so then you can make these medications more effective.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Well, at least, yes, yes, at least in the mouse model we need to

Host: In the mouse model.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: And then can set the stage for future work.

Host: So the goal, again, I'm looking at this like, oh, this challenge seems insurmountable in some cases, but the best part is that you found this unexpected information. You were like, thank goodness we know this now and now we can ask the right questions so we can build things to help.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yes, absolutely. I think the models that we established, we don't see the models as the end of the road. Like this is just the beginning. We have all of the tools and we can use them to ask these difficult questions and see where, what the science teaches us.

Host: That's so neat. Obviously, I hope people are listening and I don't think the majority of us look at anything and say, this is insurmountable. Each person in science has their own challenges and we're like, we could do this, right? And so I guess my question is in what do you hope like your work can do for breast cancer someday? Like what would be like one day you're like, we did this.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: I think for us, it's targeting this population of more mesenchymal, quasi mesenchymal refractory cells. Like, this is really the type of cancer cell that's driving not just resistance to chemotherapy, but these cells do many things, right? They're perhaps facilitating metastasis, that's the spread of these cells from the primary tumor to different parts of the body.

Most breast cancer deaths, they're not because of the primary tumor, they're because of the metastasis. And so a lot of efforts in the field are really focused on targeting this population of more mesenchymal cells. And so what we're hoping to do is to use immunological approaches, to eliminate them. And so that is the dream, that's the vision, we're taking little steps towards it.

Host: Yeah, we don't do giant leaps in science. It's typically a few small steps at a time. And there's, there we are back to that diversity of thought, back to why science is for everyone, right? And, and we love this. So I'm like so thrilled to hear that because your immunology brain is doing all of these good things.

And clearly you're doing good things because she reads, she refers to her notes, that you won the Judy Appleton PhD Early Career Excellence in Research Award. Holy moly. Can you tell me about what this award, I don't know a lot about this award, if you want to share a little bit about the award or share with our audience, and then what this award will do for you, like moving forward, what it's done for you.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, so this award is thanks to Dr. Jeff Letchworth, who has named this award in honor of Dr. Judy Appleton, who was here at Cornell and has done some really fascinating work in the field of immunology. So I consider myself very, I'm very grateful for this award and I'm thankful that I got this at this stage of my career.

Because of the generosity of Dr. Letchworth and Dr. Appleton, we now have some funds, and that saves us from waiting from, you know, the conventional grant review process.

Host: So just briefly, right, for people listening, like, it's not like money is just roll it, like, there's money everywhere for people to do certain types of research. That's just not the way it goes.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Well, I wish that was the case, but that's not what happens. We have to apply for grants. We have to apply for funding. Some of those are federal funds. Some of them come as pilot funds. Some are endowments. And so, as scientists, we constantly need to bring in the money that we're able to do the experiments at the bench.

And so, the Judy Appleton Award will really facilitate some of that. And because of this very generous gift, I have been able to recruit more students to my lab. It comes at a very critical time in my career as an Assistant Professor when I'm just starting my lab up. And, it allows me to recruit talented graduate students to my lab.

It gives me the flexibility to explore different ideas. So we're using these funds in many different ways, not just for recruitment of students, but also in helping us understand mechanistically what is going on in some of these mesenchymal tumors that respond. It's helping us translate some of our work outside of the mouse model.

This is a huge benefit of being here at the Veterinary College at Cornell. I also have students, graduate students, in my lab who already have DVM degrees or are pursuing, DVM together with PhD. And they're interested in translating these findings to canine mammary carcinomas or feline mammary carcinomas.

It really helps us, once again, adopt a very different perspective to this work and help translate it beyond the mouse model and use these funds to really look at mechanism and understand the biology for why this is happening.

Host: That's amazing. Well, congratulations, first of all, because it's quite an achievement. It sounds like it was obviously it's for a person that did incredible things. And here you are innovating and doing incredible things at the university. It's allowed you to be more of a mentor to students. You have more students doing good things.

And that's another reason why I love the College of Veterinary Medicine because here you are doing this human side research, let's say, even though it's in a mouse model, which again, that's important also. And then it can translate to these students who will be taking it and maybe doing their own research on the feline and canine side.

And as a General Practitioner, who cuts these out routinely, and in cats it's very aggressive, actually, it's mind boggling and just wonderful, and I just want to say, like, thank you! And by the way, if you've looked at her lab site, there is a section called Lab Fun, which I loved, because it shows these, these incredible students. I was like, yes! You can feel free to mention anything about Lab Fun you like.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: So since you've seen the pictures, yeah, I can preface it a little bit. And so the lab culture for me is very important. We are scientists, and the science is, you know, what keeps us going, but at the end of the day, we're human beings and we work together in the lab. You spend, at least when I was a graduate student, I spent more time in the lab than I did at home. My lab, and throughout my, you know, not just as a graduate student, even as a postdoc, right, you spend more time at the bench and your colleagues your friends. They're not just your colleagues. Yes, you have you get intellectual support from them. You get emotional support from them.

They're your friends. If you are an international graduate student and you come to the lab, you don't know anyone, your lab mates are your friends. They were my friends when I came, to a different country. And so it's very important for me to foster an environment where people respect each other, where people are good lab citizens.

And I really think that that eventually will affect the quality of the science. So we make it an effort, when we recruit students to recruit not just brilliant scientists, but to recruit individuals who are good lab citizens. And then, we just have fun activities, where it's just getting an ice cream, sometimes it's going on a hike.

Host: I mean, okay, the fun stopped at hiking for me, but I'm on board with ice cream, and if anybody comes to Cornell, you have to go to the Dairy Bar. It's fantastic. But that's amazing, because we, we know that good, I say good citizens, I love that term, but people who like to work together, and they enjoy not only their work, but their culture and their environment, and they're happy.

There's more to the, even more to the work, even more passion, even more love, even more, because it is long hours.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, I completely agree. It's long hours and the results are not immediate, right? I mean, we have so many failed experiments before something works. And so you don't get, it's not immediate gratification that I do an experiment and at the end of the day, I'm, you know, going to have the answers to all these questions.

It's a slow process. It's a difficult process. It requires persistence. And, while you do need intellectual support and mentorship for that, you do need your colleagues to talk to about these things because you're not the only one with a failed experiment, right? Colleague working down the hallway from you probably had five failed experiments and everybody is upset.

So it's nice to have a community to not just talk about, you know, getting through these difficult times, but also to troubleshoot. You have two people with their western blots not working and they're not talking to each other. Then, they're both going to be upset at their bench and not know what to do. But if these two individuals came together and talked, hey, you know, this is what's not working for me, and that's not what's working for me, then you troubleshoot the problem together and you find perhaps more than one solution. And that's another reason why having a good lab culture where people communicate with each other is very, very important.

Host: Yes. 100%. It's not, you did that wrong. It's, I've done that wrong. Here's what I did to fix it. Or here's how maybe we could look at it in your experiment. I love that. And so what does a typical day look like for you? Is there a typical day?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: No, there is no typical day. Every day is different. And that's what I love about this job. It's a unique challenge every day. So my day is, well, so I have a I have a family too. I have a seven year old son. And so my day is like split between the lab and home. And so it starts with my son and dropping him off to school and spending time with him and then I come to the lab and in the lab I mean, it's different on different days. If I, you know, when I'm not teaching a lot of my time is spent in the lab.

I love working with students. I really love mentoring students. So I spend time with all of the students in my lab. I spend time writing grants there. I spend up attending seminars or sitting on committees or attending meetings.

Michelle Moyal, DVM (Host): Yeah.

Host: There's a lot that's involved being at an academic institution, for those listening, right? So you have research, you have to, maybe you're giving talks, you're working with your community, you serve on a committee, you're doing, it's not like you're at a desk just doing your research every day.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Absolutely. I think that's what makes it so exciting, right? It's not just about thinking about the science, but there are so many different aspects to being a good scientist. You have to be good at the bench. You have to be able to communicate your work in written or oral form as presentations or writing grants.

You have to serve in the committee. You have to mentor other students. And so my day is, you know, divided doing these different things. And then, at the end of my day, I go back home and I switch off and I'm with my son and

Host: She said off, but she goes home to a young, a child. I'm sure that doesn't sound so easy, but okay.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Yeah, well, I talk about different things. So maybe I, I switch off in a different way. So now I'm not talking about EMT anymore, right? We talk about cars and trucks and superheroes and, you know, fun stuff like that. So. A little different.

Host: That's incredible. Oh, I really appreciate you sharing that. So, I love asking a few questions just to get to know, these amazing scientists like you on a little bit more of a personal level, not too personal. Here's what I'm going to ask. Just a few quick questions about just like your likes.

I call it a little lightning round. But as a nod to Cornell, I actually love when you get to serve on committees and talk to others in the college that are not even in your department. We have more of that diversity of thought, so sometimes I'm like, they just gave me a great idea, right? And I, I run to kind of go talk about that.

Okay, so do you have a favorite restaurant in Ithaca? This is, does this draw people in?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Taste of Thai.

Host: Oh, deli that's solid, solid choice. Does music play in your lab?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: I think it plays in individual people's ears.

Host: So people just get to ear pods on

Anushka Dongre, PhD: And listen to their own thing, but no, we don't have music playing in the lab because I think everybody has different tastes.

Host: Yes. Do you do music when you're at the bench doing, like, are you listening to something?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: I love listening to music, but I usually don't listen to it in the lab. I, I'm one of those people who likes to focus with no sound.

Host: know, so people would be mortified at me and some of the students, when I'd be teaching, they like, love to have something. I needed, I need silence when I review stuff.

Don't think I'm a creep, people.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: I, well, I'm the same for me. It's very quiet and, uh, but I do enjoy listening to music outside the lab.

Host: Do you have a favorite artist?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: I like Imagine Dragons. They're my favorite.

Host: Oh, ooh, that's a solid choice. They're very, they're on my workout playlist. They're very motivational sometimes.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: I love them. Yeah.

Host: And then, salty or sweet?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Salty.

Host: Favorite snack, favorite salty snack?

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Takis.

Host: Oh, ooh, Takis are good. Oh, but I think I'd still go sugar. That's incredible. See, leaves the bench, she goes, gets her Takis, and then she thinks about all these amazing things. I think it's just so neat, and I want to highlight the fact that, again, you're doing all of this amazing research on the human side, and I think sometimes people forget that at a veterinary institution, all sorts of things happen for the good of just humanity, including animals.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: I completely agree with you. And I think the advantage of being here at the vet school is that we have access to these other models, right? Other people don't. And if anything, the canine model for breast cancer or a feline model for breast cancer would model human cancer much more than a mouse model would.

The mouse models are great. They're, quick. They allow us to, you know, make all these manipulations to understand mechanism. But all the mice are essentially uniform, right? They're all the same. You don't get the diversity in terms of the breed or in terms, you could engineer that into your system, but, the sampling size and the diversity that you would get with samples from a canine or a feline mammary carcinoma is going to be much more and much more representative of what you're likely to get from a human population.

And so I'm very, very happy to be here and have students in my lab who can bring that expertise in and, you know, enrich the work that we're doing.

Host: I love that so much. So many good things. I am so thrilled I had the opportunity to talk to you. Dr. Anushka Dongre here at Cornell doing this amazing research. Thank you so much for joining me on our first video, our vodcast. Incredible. You're wonderful.

Anushka Dongre, PhD: Thank you so much, Michelle. You're very kind. I mean, I really enjoyed this discussion and I'm really thankful to you for having me as your guest.

Host: Yes. Well, thank you. And thank everybody for listening. And if you are listening, tell your, or watching, tell your friends that I'm adorable and quite personable, in addition to being an extrovert and that everyone should give our podcast, AKA now Vodcast, a listen and a like and subscribe on your favorite platform.

Thank you so much for listening to the Cornell Veterinary Podcast. And we'll talk to you soon.