How much money is your life worth to you? Or maybe the life of your loved one?

If you or someone you care about has the type of cancer resistant to standard treatments – radiotherapy and chemotherapy – you will likely be faced with a difficult choice: pay for novel end-of-the-line cancer treatments such as CAR-T cell therapies, which can cost over $300,000 per single dose, or give up.

The rate of cancer in adults under 50 is steadily increasing, a concern especially in Armenia due to the stressful economic and diplomatic environment leading people to cope with carcinogens such as alcohol, cigarettes, and unhealthy comfort foods. Adding on to this concern, the prohibitive cost of novel cancer therapies is not only a matter of survival but also of the quality of life of cancer patients. Financially accessible cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy, cause dramatic and debilitating side effects due to their inability to distinguish healthy cells from cancer cells. Targeted cancer treatments that primarily kill cancer cells are prohibitively expensive because biopharmaceutical companies have minimal incentive to innovate with affordability in mind.

I struggle to come to terms with this exploitative approach to saving lives. In my opinion, there are two potential solutions:

1. Conduct research in academia to find innovative ways of lowering the costs of existing cancer therapies or developing new ones.
2. Bring cancer therapy R&D and manufacturing to Armenia, and conduct these with local prices.

To achieve the latter, we need professionals who are well-versed in cancer research, understand how to run a life science enterprise, and how to develop and manufacture safe cancer therapies. This is where I aim to contribute.

I gained a solid foundation in life science manufacturing and business with my bachelor’s degree. In 2023, I graduated from University College London with a degree in the Bioprocessing of New Medicines, focusing on novel medicinal therapies. This interdisciplinary degree, combining biology, business, and biochemical engineering, was tailored to learning about the biologically creative ways of treating and curing a myriad of different diseases. These innovative approaches included using viral envelopes to transport DNA, engineering human tissue in a laboratory, and designing novel proteins. I also gained an understanding of how to run a life science business, from the regulatory and financial considerations to the step-by-step manufacturing processes necessary to produce novel therapies.

After my bachelor’s degree, I gained work experience in the field of cancer therapy research and development. I worked as a Junior Research Associate at Valink Therapeutics, a company committed to developing a range of antibodies against cancer cells using high-throughput research. From conducting delicate flow cytometry experiments to operating robotic machinery for large-scale experiments, I tested hundreds of bispecific antibodies with differing biological mechanisms against each other to see which of them had the best potential as cancer therapies.

Thanks to my work experience, I saw innovation in action. Conducting high-throughput research allowed us to produce vast quantities of data for a fraction of the cost and time, greatly contributing to the potential affordability of the final product. However, through this job, I identified an area where I needed to personally grow as a scientist. See, I had an engineering and statistical approach to biology, focusing on how to generate more information without sacrificing the quality of the data, but I was not quite a cellular bioscientist. I was not experienced in conducting low-throughput intricate research on what was going on inside cells, to see the chain of reactions that took place when we treated cells with cancer therapy.

This is where the Master of Research degree in Molecular and Cellular Biosciences at Imperial College London (hereinafter referred to as ICL) comes in. This degree consists of two research projects I can undertake at any research group in the Department of Life Sciences. I will get the opportunity to gain experience in the research techniques most crucial to me as a cancer therapy researcher, such as electron microscopy and mass spectrometry, and I will get to deepen my knowledge of the science behind some of the novel cancer therapies currently in development. To add to that, ICL is well-rated for its academic prowess. Considering my degree is fully research-focused, the academic prowess of ICL is invaluable to my development as a cancer therapy researcher. Also, as an interdisciplinary scientist, I will have ample opportunity to form fruitful and powerful networks with researchers across scientific disciplines.

Every year, the number of professionals in Armenia with experience in some aspect of cancer research grows, with some of these professionals being previous Huys scholars and others gaining work experience at some of the bioinformatics companies emerging in Yerevan. With the growing number of business investments coming into Armenia, there is a real opportunity to create new cancer therapy start-ups. This will not only allow for more affordable cancer therapies to be made for Armenians but also create an opportunity for bioscientists in the country to gain work experience locally.

I hope to be one of those bioscientists. With the MRes in Molecular and Cellular Science from Imperial College London, I will bring to the table my academic knowledge of what is required to run a life science business from the manufacturing, regulatory, and financial point of view, my professional experience of working in industrial high-throughput cancer therapy R&D, and my new skillset in conducting cellular research to combat cancer in novel ways.

I am aware that Huys Foundation is granting the Huys Scholarship to me with the anticipation of my good faith pursuit and implementation of the projects and undertakings described in this letter, to which I hereby commit.