Eric Minikel and Sonia Vallabh with host Joel Watts (left) and Chair Justin Nodwell (right) enjoy a reception after their seminar.
The Department heard a remarkable account of Eric Minikel and Sonia Vallabh’s response to the news that she carries the same mutation in the prion protein gene that led to her mother’s premature death from fatal familial insomnia. Prior to this, Eric had graduated from MIT and worked in transportation planning and Sonia had completed Harvard Law School. They soon put these promising careers behind them and began to re-invent themselves in the areas of bioinformatics and neuroscience, with current positions as PhD students at the Harvard Broad Institute in the lab of Stuart Schreiber.
During the seminar we heard about the difficult time they had responding to the results of Sonia’s genetic test and the process they went through to becoming proactive in the search for novel therapies for prion disease. They have already completed a study of human mutations in the prion gene and discovered that several mutations previously though to be disease associated are in fact benign – great news for those carrying these mutations!
For more on this inspirational story, please have a look at a recent article in the Harvard Gazette.
