HST MEMP 2024 grad Carmen Martin Alonso
Awarded a provisional patent for her work on liquid biopsy “priming agents,” she hopes to be the founding scientist of a start-up soon.
Mindy Blodgett | HST-IMES
When Carmen Martin Alonso was growing up in the small town of Cordoba in the south of Spain, she loved math, science, and biology, and she dreamed of someday working in medicine. But, she says, she could never have predicted then the path she took to her budding career as a medical researcher, first studying in London, then finding her way to Cambridge, and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST).
Martin Alonso, a 2024 HST Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) PhD graduate, graduated in 2018 from London’s Imperial College, with both a Bachelor’s, and a Master’s degree, in biomedical engineering. She first heard of the HST program when she received a scholarship to spend the summer doing research at MIT.
“That was when I was exposed to HST, and to Boston, and to how research is conducted here,” Martin Alonso says. In Spain, according to Martin Alonso, high school students who are interested in medicine are expected to enroll directly into medical programs at the college level, requiring them to make an early decision about career paths. “I always felt a tension between my interest in medicine, and my interest in engineering—so making the big jump from out of my small town to London allowed me to study both.”
“After I got my degree, I applied for medical school in the UK, but that earlier summer at MIT motivated me to apply to HST too,” Martin Alonso says. “I wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend all my time seeing patients, so HST, with its blend of both engineering and medicine, was the right balance for me.”
Martin Alonso started at HST in 2018. In looking back, she says that one of her favorite courses was pathology, taught by HST Associate Director Richard N. Mitchell, MD, PhD; and Robert F. Padera, Jr. (HST ’00 and HST MEMP, ’98), associate professor, pathology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. And she says that one of the highlights of her time at HST was the clinical rotation (HST202) she did at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. “I remember cycling from my apartment to Mount Auburn, at dawn, and how beautiful it was to watch the sunrise,” she recalls. “And then spending all day with patients, leaving for home in the pitch dark.”
Martin Alonso took the Mount Auburn class in January, 2023, after the return to in-person instruction, from the Covid pandemic-era of online only classes. She says that being an HST student during the pandemic enhanced her experience at Mount Auburn, as she was doing work that now seemed more important than ever.
“I really felt as if I was part of the medical team there,” she says. “It was so fulfilling to feel that I was helping.” As part of the classes at that time, the students and faculty held discussions about the hardships they were encountering at the hospital, with the lingering challenges of Covid, all making for a profound experience for the engineers in training.
Despite the difficulties and challenges the pandemic created for learning when classes were on Zoom, Martin Alonso says that the HST faculty “did what they could to make learning fun.”
“When Covid hit, it was hard timing for so many things,” she remembers. “But we (including other HST students) were able to keep up our “Friendsgiving” celebration in the Fall… this was a tradition we had throughout our time with HST, we really enjoyed it, and we would rotate who would host.”
While at HST, Martin Alonso conducted research in the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies (LMRT), led by Sangeeta Bhatia, John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS), an HST faculty member, and a core faculty member of the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). Working at the lab, she says that she was gratified to be part of a team spanning the Chris Love Lab at the Koch Institute, and the Viktor Adalsteinsson Lab at the Broad Institute, to develop “priming agents”—agents that improve the ability to detect cancer from a blood draw. The breakthrough, which was published in a paper in Science with Martin Alonso as one of the lead authors, received extensive media coverage and as reported in MIT News, makes it easier to detect circulating tumor DNA in blood samples, which could enable earlier cancer diagnosis and help guide treatment.
Based on her work, a provisional patent was filed for liquid biopsy “priming agents.” These agents function by inducing a transient buildup of DNA molecules in blood, and constitute a novel method for recovering more DNA molecules from a blood draw with the potential to transform the delivery of cancer care. For this work, Martin Alonso received the 2024 IMES Prince Prize for this innovation (the prize, which was established by HST alumnus Martin Price, awards one HST MEMP PhD student $5,000 cash prize for work resulting in a patentable invention—work must have been performed while enrolled at HST).
The past few months have been busy for Martin Alonso, who, while finishing up her PhD, has been exploring raising money for a start-up company based on her patent, and who also found time to get married in April.
“I had a bunch of projects going on at once and I had to learn when to drop something that wasn’t going somewhere,” Martin Alonso says. “I was planning a wedding, and my PhD defense, and looking at maybe starting a company, all within the space of four months. Now that I am married and I have the degree, I’m looking forward to finding more work-life balance.”
Martin Alonso, who hopes to transition to a position as founding scientist in the start-up soon, says she is excited about the opportunities that lie ahead, especially as it relates to taking the technology one step further and working towards a first human clinical trial for priming agents. Improving cancer patient outcomes and ultimately enabling earlier cancer detection to save more patients’ lives is what motivated Martin Alonso to pursue a PhD in the first place.
During her time on campus, Martin Alonso says she thought it was important to “give back” to the Spanish community, serving as president of the Spain@MIT organization, for two years. She enjoys several hobbies—including dance, tennis, learning languages, and cooking, and she says she fondly remembers participating in events sponsored by the MIT Biotech group, and Hackathons with MIT Hacking Medicine.
She advises anyone interested in coming to HST to “be open-minded, and willing to take advantage of the many opportunities on campus. I tend to say: ‘yes’ too often—but I do believe that you need to open yourself up to what is going on outside of the bubble in your lab, in order to get the most from the program.”