Turning Lab Discoveries into Cancer Diagnostics — A Conversation with Dr. Jessica Winter

Dr. Liz Wayne, Office Hours Host, is joined by Dr. Jessica Winter, Distinguished Professor of Engineering at The Ohio State University, as they explore how technology becomes life-changing diagnostics. Winter shares how quantum dot “tighter and brighter” labels are making leukemia and lymphoma testing faster and more sensitive, why earlier detection saves lives, and how her own breast cancer diagnosis sharpened her mission. They discuss teaming up with clinicians, and training the next generation to design with patients in mind. Plus: a “World Without BME” segment that reminds us why biomedical engineering touches everything.

Links to Jessica Winters
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Links to Jessica Winter's Work:
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Transcript

[Music] 

Liz Wayne: Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of office hours with Liz Wayne. I'm Liz, an assistant professor in bioengineering, and I'm going to introduce you to the world of biomedical engineering through my eyes or through my voice, from genes to machines, biomedical engineers can do it all. So we're going to dive into how discoveries are made, how research becomes medicine, and what it's actually like working in academia today. So something that I think about a lot is, Why am I a professor? Why am I here? And why am I doing this? It can be really hard to stay motivated. I think that resonates with more people than they think, and what is the work that we're doing and the impact that we're having in society to people, even our own families. And I think part of that journey of thinking back has been thinking about what made me want to become a professor, or what was the initial start. I know it's grown so much since then, and when I think about it, for me, it was thinking about wanting to be a professor because of the power that knowledge gave me and the knowledge that it gave other people. I remember being in physics class, and I was a physics undergrad major, because I thought, if you understand the physical world around you, you're like, the master of everything. I was super nerd. Still am. I was also taking chemistry, because you kind of have to take the other sciences. And we were doing something about Beer's Law of extinction, and it didn't really make any sense to me. It's kind of boring, like whatever I'm like, ABC, you know, learn these little laws. But then a couple of years later, I got a summer internship working in an Optics Lab, and they were making imaging diagnostic advices to look at cancer patients, and breast cancer in particular. And then all of a sudden, I see this equation again. And they're like, Well, this is how we can actually tell what is inside a tissue. So we use this beers extinction law, so that we can tell how oxygenated blood is, how if something is fat or if something is water, and we can do this without ever cutting someone open. And that was just so eye opening for me, one to see that like full reflection kind of coming right back at me, but also I felt powerful. I felt like, wait, I know that. And if I know it, I don't really think I'm the smartest person in the world, but they taught me that, Oh, my God, they weren't lying to me. This is useful. And I kind of felt like I wanted to be a professor, because I wanted to make that experience happen for other people, where they felt like something they learned was something they could use and see and understand the world around them and help other people. And I also wanted to think, Wow, this physics I'm using doesn't just help me understand the world, but it helps me do something about it and help people help themselves. And I think of the job as a professor as twofold, which is to perform research that pushes the boundaries of what we know and what we can do with that new knowledge. So how do we we push what we know, and then we think, what can we do now that we know some basic information about the world that can help other people? That's really hard. I think my adventure from being an undergrad and just, you know, this really simple chemical law, to making an imaging optic device that can help patients, and then thinking, Oh, I can just keep doing that. That was so easy, and it was just so so hard. But for this office hours, my dear listeners, I have brought to you an expert of experts. I brought to you a special guest, someone who really knows how to put practice into the work. Professor Jessica winter, welcome, Dr winter, how are you doing today?  

Jessica Winter: I'm great. Thanks for having me.  

Liz Wayne: I'm so excited. I'm kind of hyping you up because you're going to answer all of my problems and helping you figure out how exactly you really help make that full circle complete, not only maybe for students to realize that what we're teaching them is valuable, but thinking of this actual practice of how you take knowledge and then go from this abstract classroom setting to like a real world application. So why don't you tell the listeners in your own words who you are and what you do. 

Jessica Winter: Sure. I'm Jessica winter. I'm a professor in chemical and Biomedical Engineering here at The Ohio State University, and most of my research is at the interface of bionanotechnology, so how to use nanoparticles and nanomaterials for biological or biomedical applications. 

Liz Wayne: So, you make things and you put them into people, and then people trust you to put them into people. 

Jessica Winter: Um, not everything goes inside a person, so we do a lot of work in in vitro diagnostics, similar to like a covid test, where you're testing something outside the body, but it's still for biomedical use, yeah.  

Liz Wayne: And so one of the ways that I came across your work was because you were also making diagnostic tests, and you were trying to figure out ways that people could detect cancer, either sooner or better or just to be better informed about risk of cancer. So where did that motivation come from for you? 

Jessica Winter: Well, to be honest, cancer is a research strength at Ohio State, so when I showed up here, there were a lot of people that wanted to collaborate with me, and were interested in using my materials for cancer, and I started developing some different ideas with people. The materials that I make are called quantum dots. They won the Nobel Prize a couple years ago. I didn't win the Nobel Prize, not claiming that, just for clarification, but they are pretty famous for their properties, and one of the things that they do is they absorb light, and then they can emit light at a different wavelength. And so we can use this to make something called like a bio label, or a tag that can be used to target a specific part of the tissue or the or a cell to label a biomarker, and then the biomarkers are used to diagnose different diseases. So I was working on some different biomarkers for cancer detection with some collaborators, when about three months into that project, I got diagnosed with breast cancer, and so my desire to develop cancer diagnostics, obviously was greatly increased by my own diagnosis. So yeah, that colors almost all of the work that I do. 

Liz Wayne: How do you go from doing research to me search like, how do you? How do you even make that kind of transition? 

Jessica Winter: So it was kind of interesting. I had learned a lot about breast cancer, which is what I was diagnosed with, and what I had been working on through my reading, and so I kind of understood my situation and the disease, and there wasn't anything that I could do on the therapeutic side, because my research just wasn't advanced enough for that. But I realized that if I could do something to help patients besides myself, I would be making a big impact on cancer separate from my own personal battle with the disease, and it gave me a target as something to go after, because I would rather other people not have to experience what I did, and I want to make the experience better for the people that come after me however I can. And so I was able to make an impact on the diagnostic side. And so that's where I'm going to put my energies? 

Liz Wayne: Yeah, I'm sorry. That's just really powerful. That's really hard. There's so many things I could talk about or just even think about, and I guess the one thing I would say is that just resonating with the experience. I haven't been diagnosed with cancer, but I study cancer, and when my parent's got cancer, it didn't really help me in the way I thought it would. It maybe it helped knowing words that people were saying. But the system, the healthcare system, was so different, or the emotional, psychological things were not helped by just having more information. Like, it wasn't like you had the same amount of energy, you know, to do that process. And so like, what kind of diagnostics do you do exactly then for cancer? 

Jessica Winter: When we started, we were hoping we could really do something directly with breast cancer, but it turned out that my materials are better suited for leukemia and lymphoma detection. So that's kind of the space that we pivoted into. And these are blood cancers. And so when you have a blood cancer, you're often diagnosed through your blood, right, which is the liquid. So the way that they do this is they take a blood sample and they attach labels to different biomarkers on the cells, and they analyze it on something called a flow cytometer, which passes cells through a little tube, one by one, and if it has the biomarkers, it lights up. And if it doesn't, then you wouldn't see anything. And then, based on the number of cells that have the biomarkers, which biomarkers they have, and how bright it is, they can kind of determine what type of treatment you should receive and what type of cancer you have. So, for example, if you were diagnosing a type of leukemia, you might need to look at 12, to say, 20 different biomarkers all at the same time. And that's a lot of biomarkers. And then, based on what you saw, you would decide whether the patient got treatment, A, B or C. So, it's kind of a triaging for patients to figure out what type of cancer and then what treatment. And the advantage of our technology is what they're using before had a couple problems. One is that when you have a label that's red, wasn't really red, it was a little bit orange, and maybe it was a little bit deep red. And so. I can't use an orange label and a red label at the same time, because they can't tell them apart. They're going to basically look the same. But our labels are just red, and that's because quantum dots have what's called a narrower emission bandwidth, meaning their color is tighter. So we like to stay tighter and brighter for our products, and so the tighter allows me to fit more of the labels in the same scan and not have to do multiple scans to get, like, all of the 20 labels, and then that makes it faster for you to get the information for the patient. 

Liz Wayne: That's really awesome. That's a great T-shirt. I'm not you should be selling tighter and brighter. 

Jessica Winter: It should. I'll talk to some people about that, 

Liz Wayne: I would be very curious what people thought if I walked down the hallway with just tighter and brighter. But like, you know, they just put some quantum dots there. 

Jessica Winter: Who knows? So, the labels that they were using, in addition to having a broader set of colors, the quantum dots are about four orders of magnitude brighter. So that's 10 to the 4, 1000 x brighter than the current label. And what that would mean for a patient is, if you had a really low level of a biomarker that maybe was indicating Return of the disease, we would be able to tell that sooner than with the more traditional label. And like you definitely want to know faster, 

Liz Wayne: Right. And I think this is also highlighting why it's so hard to diagnose cancer. So I'm thinking about how one time in grad school, I was driving and I got a flat tire, and I, you know, when you're going from, like, one city to another city, and you break down and, like, nowhere, you're like, where am I? What's happening? And so they were really nice. But I remember, you know, we were talking about, what did I do? And I'm like, Yeah, I'm a I'm a scientist, and I I work on cancer. And then they kind of started talking about conspiracy. Well, to me, they were conspiracy theories, but these ideas that there's a cure for cancer and pharmacists hiding it, right? And I remember thinking like, no, it's actually really, really hard to treat, and it's more than one disease, and all the markers that we use, we have to have confirmation, like, it's hard to make a biomarker that is constantly expressed, that is representative over multiple patients, but also the signal intensity that you have to have the right measurements, and it's just really, really hard. 

Jessica Winter: Yeah, to describe the complexity of cancer, I'll often show something called a KEGG diagram, k, e, g, g, but what you can imagine in your head is a map for airlines, showing all the planes in the air all at the same time, all the directions they're going. So if you could just picture that in your head, you've got connections going everywhere, criss crossing, and that's kind of what your signaling diagrams inside a cell looks like. And so what happens is, if I cancel one flight going from, say, Detroit to Houston, that's going to have a little bit of impact, but the chances are I can recover from that. I can route someone, say, from Detroit to DC to Houston, and they still get there. And that's the problem, because I can make a drug that knocks out one flight, but it doesn't knock out every plane in the air. And so the cell is able to basically dodge and weave and go around whatever treatment I'm giving, because there's so much redundancy in these networks, and it's really, really difficult, yeah, and then we also have problems delivering the drugs in the first place. But that's a whole other issue for another podcast. 

Liz Wayne: Yeah. Sorry, I was actually thinking about Alaska Airlines right now. Or was it southwest? Like, if we could just have a Southwest situation happen? Answer then, then it would be easy, but then 

Jessica Winter: We need a CrowdStrike that takes down the whole network all at once. And we don't know what that would be right now, but, 

Liz Wayne: And unfortunately, to make that analogy translate, the reality is, when we do make drugs that can take down, let's say the whole system, that means the person's dead. 

Jessica Winter: Yeah, yeah. I tell people I'm really good at curing cancer. I just bleach out my cell culture dish and all the cells are dead. Yeah, I am not at all suggesting that you should imbibe substances that will kill you. 

Liz Wayne: Yeah, no, not at all. But we are looking at technologies that allow us to be more sensitive, which means they have to be brighter, they have to be more stable. So you were able to identify a place for the technology, a niche. Did you have to find collaborators to work with, like on the clinical side to test these ideas? 

Jessica Winter: Yeah, absolutely. I didn't know anything about leukemia and lymphoma. That's definitely not my area of interest. And I didn't even know that much about flow cytometry at the time, I basically developed this project, starting at Ohio State, but then we participated in the NSF I Corps boot camp program. So we started to spin out a company in response to my own cancer diagnosis and trying to really. Make our research real. And as part of that, we partnered with our current CEO, who is an expert in flow cytometry, so she brought that to the table, and then we partnered with the clinical diagnostics core at Ohio State, and they have expertise, obviously, in leukemia and lymphoma diagnostics. And so we worked together as a team to really come up with something that had the right specifications to make an impact, because engineers are not so great when you design in the absence of actually talking to clinicians, because you don't know what your design criteria are, and that's sort of important.  

Liz Wayne: Oh yeah, yeah. It's like, what will a patient actually do. What can they do? I've been impressed by how much of technology we think of as engineers. And they think, well, the patient's not going to let you do that to them, or you won't get to see them. Like, every three days a week, for every week. You know, there's like, how far they live away from the hospital, how often they have to go to work. You know, how much is this God, how much energy they have, and so all of these things really matter. So you were able to make this collaboration and make this work through combinations of working with federal funding from the National Science Foundation, working with endow resources from Ohio State University. So looking at Ohio participating, what other kind of resources did you need to kind of get this thing started. 

Jessica Winter: So we also got funding from the state of Ohio through their program to kind of help startup companies and advance materials, biotechnology and so that kind of got us going, but we hit a wall after a couple years, because we were making products, but they still had a couple issues we needed to work out. We eventually got backing from a venture partner, so we are still backed by the same venture firm, GMT, venture projects out of Atlanta, and that was really helpful, because it removes some of the fundraising concerns and allows you to really focus on the science. And so with that, we were able to really get the product going forward, and just to give people a little idea of the landscape. So our product is considered an in vitro diagnostic. That means it does not go inside people. It's going to be used on a blood sample taken from a patient and a machine outside of the patient. So this is the simplest possible FDA pathway, because I'm not paying anything inside you. It's not a drug, it's not an implant, and within that, we're actually even simpler, because we are simply a reagent that's part of an existing test. So we simply have to show that our reagent works as well as what is currently being used, and that's it. That's called an analyte specific reagent. So that's kind of our FDA pathway. And even with all of that, it takes many, many years, because it's not just about the product. You also have to have your manufacturing process locked down, something called Good Manufacturing Practice, because when I'm diagnosing your cancer, each vial of product needs to work the same way. I can't have one that's a little brighter than this one, right? It doesn't that's not going to be effective. So getting the manufacturing process tight so that I'm making the same product every time can take quite a long time. And this is different from being in a university lab, where if we make something that we don't like, we throw it out, we make another match, we don't worry about it, right? I can't do that. I'm trying to send this to patients. So, um, we were founded in 2012 and we didn't follow our first product until 2020  

Liz Wayne: Whoa. 

Jessica Winter: It was a long road, yeah. 

Liz Wayne: Oh my gosh. That's longer than the P That's a PhD and a postdoc. The is that like a normal trajectory. I mean, it's also wild, because, as you were mentioning, that is the lowest hanging fruit,  

Jessica Winter: Right. I think it took us a little longer, because we did have some fundraising issues that kind of slowed us down, but it takes a lot longer than you think it's going to just again, because the product has to be perfect each time. And for us, it's not enough to just make the product. We had to negotiate with our raw material suppliers and say, hey, the ingredients coming in. We need you to do a better job. We had to make some special contracts, like, I know normally when you sell it, the specifications are this, but I need the specifications to be that. And those kinds of things take time to work out, to figure out what's causing variation in your product, and how do I solve for that? And it's just a long process. 

Liz Wayne: Yeah, very long. I'm sure you had a moment when you thought, Should you be fully in the entrepreneur space, or should you keep working as a professor? And so how did you navigate that, that line throughout this like, let's say, the eight years. 

Jessica Winter: I was pretty lucky that the CEO who I mentioned before is very knowledgeable in the area, so they definitely needed my skill set too. But I never felt like, oh. I have to step in and run this thing, you know, I felt like it was in good hands, but I was involved pretty intimately for, you know, those eight years. And luckily, the university allows us to spend up to 20% of our time consulting. So this qualifies as that, because it's the company that was based on university research partially owned in part by the university. So that's consistent with our mission and goals. And I didn't end up spending all 20% but yeah, I spent about 10% of my time dealing with problems at the company and understanding but you know, my passion is really in developing new technologies, and so it was never something that I thought about just quitting and going there and just just working at the company, like I always am, thinking about the next thing down the line and how to get that going as well. So I guess I was just really excited about all the future things I could do as well. 

Liz Wayne: And what I'm also hearing you say just kind of leaning into this little bit, because I know a little bit about entrepreneurship, you seem to have done a good job in the beginning of establishing a team and roles. And so one of the challenges I see faculty make that I've heard is you don't know how to let your baby go, or you don't know how to make the team. So So you had a CEO that could do a lot of those other things. You were co founder and chief scientific officer, and so you had this whole other team and an ecosystem imagining that could manage those things so that you didn't have to actually do everything, but you could stay in your expertise role that you knew well, which was developing the technology, crafting the technology, and staying up to date with what's happening. 

Jessica Winter: Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate, and a lot of the credit actually does go to the NSF I Corps program. That's where we met our CEOs. So what this program is is there's three people on a team. There's a student or postdoc who helped invent the technology in the lab and is, like deeply knowledgeable of the science behind it. There's the principal investigator, aka the professor who advised the student, often generated the idea for the technology, but maybe isn't as hands on in the lab. And then you have to have a business mentor. And the business mentor, we actually didn't know anybody. We were at a loss. So we went to the university's commercialization office and said, Hey, we need a business mentor. And they knew about Christy Melnick Krug, who is our current CEO, and they said, This person would be really great. She has a lot of expertise and these labels and biomarkers, and, you know, she's a serial entrepreneur who's already had a couple of companies spin out, she'd be really good for you. So we asked her to be the business mentor, and she joined the team, and then ultimately we ended up hiring her into a CEO role over time. So that was really good, because, yeah, I've learned the hard way that professors don't actually know that much about business, 

Liz Wayne: No, no and by design, right? Again, like when I was kind of mentioning we really know how to cultivate knowledge, and then most of our energy we spend trying to figure out how to push the boundaries of what we know and developing technologies, developing like the current standards, and I think for people who also may not know, this is also something that's baked in from the bay Dole Act. So anything that is funded by the government, technically, the government owns the patents and the rights to all of them. But what was happening was that there was such a backlog of translation, because it was all in the government that the Bayh Dole Act instituted, that now the universities can kind of take ownership or control of the patents, so they had more agency to do licensing and actually commercialize Those technologies. And I believe this is like 1819, 89 there is in the 80s that this happened, but you see this exponential boost in universities pursuing entrepreneurship and getting those patents. Now the government kind of has this aspect that, like, you know, a national crisis, or times of emergencies, they can kind of step in and, like, take the patent, but no one's ever before 2025 really kind of try to interfere with that kind of relationship. And so this is one of those things that I guess the NSF is also trying to do, to incentivize universities and also professors to start thinking, like, what am I doing? And like, how do I help people with this information? 

Jessica Winter: Yeah, I think I Corps is really designed to help you bridge the gap between what you're doing in academia and what business needs. And I'll mention that before I went to I Corps, I had met with seven different companies about my technology, and I didn't get a follow up call from any of them. I understand that now, at the time, I didn't have the knowledge, because I would go in and say. Say, oh, my gosh, my technology is amazing. It can detect, like, a single molecule of something. And then the business person would say, Well, how many molecules would you need to detect to know if someone was sick or what's the baseline? Oh, I don't know that I but I can detect a single molecule, right? And then they'd ask you the better, cheaper, faster question. How is it going to make it better, cheaper, faster? Well, I'm not sure, but yeah, so when you talk to someone in business, you have to lead with the value proposition, like, here's what it's going to do for you, and here's how much people might pay for that. And I just didn't know how to have that conversation, and I Corps really taught me that, and so I'm much better at it now, but in the beginning, like, yeah, I didn't know what I was doing, so I learned everything by school of hard knocks, but we got there in the end. So it's okay. 

Liz Wayne: No, I'm so I'm so excited. And it seems like you've had a lot of success after this. So from looking at core quantum technologies, and you've also been listed on several awards from Ohio, so including like these entrepreneurship and 40 under 40 Business Awards, and getting a lot of recognition for, like, doing this incredible feat, which is, actually is very hard. It's not very hard, but you have to have the right resources and the right mindset to do that. So, you seem to be doing well. So, are you ready to do it again? 

Jessica Winter: Maybe I've been thinking about it. I feel like you have to have the right idea, and there has to be the right hole in the market. So I've been thinking a lot about that. My original goal was to try to make an impact on solid tumor diagnostics, like the breast cancer that I had, but the technology that I had at the time really wasn't good for solid tumor and that was the first lesson that I got, actually, on the business side, meeting with clinicians, and they said, we don't really use fluorescence in solid tumor diagnostics, because tissue has its own fluorescent color anyway, that drowns out all the signals that you put down. Oh, I didn't know that, right, and that's why they steered me towards blood cancer. So what we've been working on lately is something to maybe tackle that problem and understand that problem has been percolating in the back of my mind since 2012 Yeah, and it was really only about four or five years ago that I was like, Oh, I think I have a possible solution to that. It took a long time, and actually that patent has been issued, so I'm free to talk about it. But what I realized is, first of all, they're using dyes. So kind of like you dye easter eggs or something, that's what they use in solid tumor pathology, like a biopsy. They don't use these glow and the dark colors, they just use regular dyes. And the problem with dyes is, what happens if you go into art class and you mix all your colors together, 

Liz Wayne: You get brown, like a weird, ugly brown, 

Jessica Winter: Dark, muddy solution that so like, if I want to tell which one was red and which one was orange, good luck with that. Right? So that's the fundamental problem. And so what they do now is they have slide a, that stain for biomarker, A, B, C, D, and this has sort of been okay, but the problem is that, as molecular medicine is advanced thing, so all that personalized medicine you keep hearing about, it doesn't matter anymore whether I have a and b. I want to know if a and b are in the same cell. I can't do that with this sequential Yeah, I can't. So how do I do that? And there are a couple of people who'd been working on a technology called erasable labels, but they were doing it for fluorescence, so the glow in the dark, not the dyes. And we figured out a way to do that with dyes. And so that would allow you to label a, erase it, label B, erase it, they will see erase it. You get the idea. So that technology we published a couple years ago, and I think that has potential for going into the solid tumor pathology market and making an impact, but there's more things that we need to do before it's ready, so we have to show that it is compatible with standard tissue processing techniques, and we're still kind of working on that. 

Liz Wayne: And then, you know, solid tumors are so important, because if you look at the data that the American Cancer Society releases every year, it's a if you just type in to the internet, American Cancer Society facts and figures, at least when every year it's free. And if you tally those numbers, you'll see that other people getting diagnosed or dying, it's about 20% of those people have blood tumors, and 80% of the tumors are solid tumors. But because solid tumors account for like every tissue and it's really easier to do a blood draw, right? Everyone's probably done a blood draw. You just you sit in the chair and you wait patiently, if uncomfortably, but still patiently. You get a blood draw. But how do you get a tumor? How do you get a like, a tissue sample? And so that becomes a really big challenge. And so the solid tumor arena, both in terms of diagnostics, how to deliver drugs, and also in terms of, like, the the barriers of the immunology that make it so hard. To that actually attribute to developing a tumor. The solid tumor area is still the most intractable, hard to reach, hard to treat. So I'm really excited for the technologies that you're going to get. I saw you talking about publishing a paper, and so I'm curious, you know, how do you train students to have this mindset? Because, you know, again, thinking about what I was thinking about the beginning. Wow, I really, I want to be a professor, because you get to help people think about how they can use these tools to help themselves and their own communities, or their own ideas about what they think is, you know, useful. But how do you train that? 

Jessica Winter: Yeah, um, I guess this is a good time to talk for a minute about why I became a professor.  

Liz Wayne: Yes, I want your origin story.  

Jessica Winter: I wasn't sure, like a lot of kids, when I hit senior year of college, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I had done research in an academic lab, and I had also done co ops in research and development, so I was very invested in research, but I just wasn't 100% confident in where I wanted to go, and I took what would be the easiest route, because that's kind of what the majority do. And I got a job. So I was a process engineer at Intel fab 11, making Pentium chips back in the day, and Intel's a fabulous company, but I was bored out of my mind. I'm like, I was not cut out for process engineering, and I realized how much I loved research, and I really wanted to get involved in research, but if it was just that, I could have gone back into industry after a PhD, or I could have worked in a government lab. But I also really enjoy interfacing with the next generation, because I feel like I get to greatly magnify my impact. I'm doing research and I'm contributing to society, but I'm also training the next generation, and all of their successes are my successes too. And so I'm just, you know, I'm paying it forward in this massive way, by training this next generation in terms of how I get them to focus on the prize. This is one place where my own cancer experience probably gives me good perspective, because I always try to bring it back to the patient. This is what we're trying to do. These are who we're trying to help. And when you're thinking about something, it's not just some paper that you publish. It's got to be about where will this ultimately go? And it probably takes a good 20 years to develop any of these technologies from conception to implementation. But if you're not thinking about that end goal the entire way, you're going to design a hammer looking for a nail, so we've got to stay focused, right? That's what I'm hoping that I'm bringing to the table. And we've also diversified our research to focus more on some of the commercial aspects of like, okay, I found out these nanoparticles, and they're really cool, and they're labeling these cancer cells. The very first problem that I hit was I couldn't make enough of them to do even a mouse study. To do a human study, it would have taken me 22 years to make enough for one person with the process that I had developed. And I tried just making my beaker bigger, and that doesn't work. So now I'm like, Okay, I have to invent a way to manufacture these particles. And I worked with other people in my department, and you know, so we're always thinking about how to get it all the way downstream, and it's something that starts at the very beginning with how you design what you're doing. 

Liz Wayne: No, I love this. I love this. It's like, I think if there are any really early faculty on the call, or people who want to be faculty, it's important to remember that while you're working so hard to get a job of becoming professor and you, in a way, you see your faculty as kind of being, I won't call it God like, but there's this idea that we've got everything figured out, and we're already fully idealized people. And in a way, like you're constantly evolving as a professor, because what you think about training is how you learn how to be a teacher one hour and then be a mentor the other hour, a Grants Manager, and then HR, and then, you know, every single role that you have, you are learning how to do that working within the constraints that you have. And you're also thinking about not just like, how do I advance the technology, the science that I'm doing, but how do I advance education and training, and how do I invest teaching? And you're always doing that, and you're always thinking about here, what do my students need? Because every student is a new challenge, and I underestimate how much time I spend talking to other faculty going this student it's just like, how do I work with the student? Is it me, or is it like, what do I do because I'm really struggling, or to think about, like, what's happening? Or, man, you know, I trained for six years on this technology, and then I became a faculty and guess what? It's all commercialized now. Like, I don't need to do my hand anymore, right? So how do you know you're. Always learning, and so just giving yourself that grace to think of the evolution of your career, and you become better and better over time, which is also, I will say, one of the sad things about, I think, 2025 right now is that it's making it hard for people to have that evolution that happens with people becoming faculty and training and changing fundamentally. I think some of the ways that we we do this process, or even allow to do this process, or have people participate, 

Jessica Winter: Yeah, it's definitely been a difficult year. I think one of the biggest challenges is just the uncertainty, because you don't, you don't know what's happening, and it's difficult to respond to a moving target, and so that made it very challenging. And thirdly, the reduction in funding, it's gonna, you know, I can't employ as many people if I don't have as much money. It's that simple, right? So grad students in my fields are paid, and their tuition is paid off of federal grants. So if there's less federal grants, there will be less grad students. That's just the reality. That's the math. You know. 

Liz Wayne: Before we go on to our next section, I wanted to ask you probably one of the most personal questions I had for you, but I was thinking about cancer, and I was thinking about family, and I'm my I think that, you know, when we think about cancer treatment, we're also thinking about how it affects our family. And I'm curious, what does your family think of your career path? 

Jessica Winter: Oh, I mean, I think they're pretty proud of me and they're excited about what I'm working on. We have a lot of successful people in my family. The bar is pretty high, just a thing, but yeah, no, they're quite happy with me. I think people respect the knowledge that I've gained over time, and I want to talk about my family for a minute. So I was the first person in my family to be diagnosed with breast cancer. I was 35 I'm 50 now, so it'll be 15 years and next February, but But after that, additional family members have been diagnosed with cancer. So my mom and one of my aunts and one of my cousins and I was diagnosed at Stage Three a which stage one is like, there's just a little bit of cancer there, and stage two is like, okay, it's spread a little bit, but it's still like, in your breast, say, or in the organ, stage three means that it has left the building. And in my case, I had three lymph nodes involved, oh no, but no other spread. And then stage four is metastatic spread. So, my aunt and my mom that were diagnosed were stage one, and my cousin was stage four, and she passed away. So one of the things I tell people about cancer is I believe the cure to cancer will be earlier diagnosis. We are really, really good at curing stage one cancer. Many of the cancers that we consider the least curable or the least treatable, like pancreatic cancer or ovarian The reason is, we don't diagnose them till they're already stage four, because the symptoms aren't really strong, and people don't know they have it, and we don't have a good screening test. But if we could diagnose those earlier, I believe that we'd have a much better shot at curing them. So I'm all in on diagnostics. I think this is how we get in combination with advancing of therapies to the final goal, which is making cancer like your broken leg. It sucks, but we treat it, and you keep going on with life, yes, and so yeah, my cousin was diagnosed with metastatic cancer at age 41 and she lived about a year and then passed away. Wow, because it had not been detected. That's really rough. That's, I think about her every day, and that definitely drives me.  

Liz Wayne: Yeah, thank you for sharing. This is why we do it, and diagnostics is so, so important. Yeah, I think the people are always wondering, what's the best way to treat this, and I have to say, I've done more work on the drug delivery side, but the more work that I do on delivery, and the more times I've talked to patients or looking at cancer outcomes, epidemiology researchers, you just see so much where it's like, actually, if they had just gone to the doctor even six months before. If you shorten the time between that first visit and their diagnosis, they have a better chance of survival. And those things are kind of free, and therapies are not free. You know, if our most expensive, elaborate precision medicine is like car T or whatever it takes, like half a million dollars, and you might not survive that, right? Versus going to the doctor sooner. That's that's a way better sell. And it's just this is where the frontier is to me, and yes, I don't want to have people have multiple, multiple deaths in their family to get there. So I imagine your family must be especially proud of you making these diagnostic tests and really trying. To push forward and feeling like, you know, it makes, makes their lives mean more? 

Jessica Winter: Yeah, I think so. And it is very satisfying for me personally to do what I can, and I'm only one person, but, you know, I lead a team, and we all work together across the university and outside of it to try to push these technologies forward. But yeah, I agree with you. I think diagnostics is leading the path, and more and more people are also latching onto blood based diagnostics, like, could we detect your cancer in your blood without having to do a biopsy? So biopsies are pretty invasive and depends on the organ that you're targeting, and they're very painful. I can speak from my experience. So if we could just do a blood draw, that would definitely be preferable. So those technologies are advancing, and people are trying to come up with those things, but one of the fundamental challenges is, in order for the cancer to be detected in, say, a blood sample. It needs to be in the blood sample. And what I mean by that is, if I take five mils of blood, but the rate of your cancer cell being there is one in every 60 mils, I probably wouldn't be able to detect it. And that's one of the fundamental issues, is that, and it doesn't even matter how good my test is, if it can detect that one cell, awesome. But if the cell's not in the blood to detect, yeah, doesn't work. And I'm not going to drain 60 mils out of you, believe me, you wouldn't want that. So we need to develop technologies based on markers that have abundancy Early in the cancer development stage, and then figure out how to make those tests as sensitive as possible, so that we can detect it as early as possible. 

Liz Wayne: Yeah, you know, I like macrophages and pneumonocytes a lot, and I think about the immune system and them really being sensitive to things before anything really like that's their job. And just this idea of, can you actually sample immune cell function in the bloodstream, especially these cells that then infiltrate into tissue as ways to predict what is going to happen in tumor environments. 

Jessica Winter: Probably so. About 15 years ago, circulating tumor cells were all the rage. And what these are, these are cells that escape the primary tumor, enter the bloodstream, and they're circulating in the blood. And the thought was we could use this to make a blood diagnostic. And the truth is, it does work. So the more of these you have, the worse your prognosis. But when I talk to my clinical counterparts, and this is where that clinical piece is important, they say, Yes, but I already knew that from the other tests that I've been giving you. You didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but it does correlate, and that's good. But one of the things that was really interesting there, since you like macrophages, my collaborator, who does these circulating tumor cell captures, he kept finding these circulating tumor cells that were a CD for 45 positive which should not be a thing, right? And he realized later that it was something called, I think it's an F riocyte, where it was a macrophage in the process of eating the tumor cell, and it would show the macrophage markers and the tumor cell markers. So maybe there's a path forward by looking for those types of macrophages chomping down on a cancer cell. You know, maybe that would be interesting. 

Liz Wayne: Yeah, I like how you think, let's keep working do this. Okay? I love it, yeah, this, this new, this podcast, is not actually about talking to other people. It's just about me expanding my friend group, my research. So, you're going to help me get into translation. Have some great ideas. 

Jessica Winter: We do that pretty well at Ohio State. We're supported by a NIH funded Comprehensive Cancer Center, which gives us money to do all these large research projects. Yeah, so I'm very fortunate. 

Liz Wayne: The first and last time I will say this, but shout out to The Ohio State University. Okay, okay, we're going to take a quick break and we'll see you soon.  

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Liz Wayne: and we're back. I want to take a little segue and then do a segment called A World Without BME, a world without biomedical engineering. So, as you may or may not know, and I'm guessing you know, because you probably go with your family, or go with other people who aren't academics, they don't know what you do. And then you say, what do you do? And you say, I'm a biomedical engineer, or I'm pretty today, you're a biomedical engineer. I know you also work in chemical engineering, and it's a really nice intersect.  

Jessica Winter: No, I have a joint appointment. I identify both ways. 

Liz Wayne: You identify both ways. So, but I don't know about you, but sometimes people say to me, what is that? And I'm like, What do you mean? It's all around you. And so we're doing this series about what. Biomedical engineering would look like, or what a world without biomedical engineering would look like. And so for you answer that question, what would the world look like without biomedical engineering? 

Jessica Winter: A world without biomedical engineering would be medieval. We would probably be all dead by 25 because there are a number of advancements that we've been able to make in medicine that have substantially prolonged life. The first that came to me was dialysis, because that, that is a biomedical engineering concept. CT scan, PET scan, MRI, in thinking engineer, biomedical engineer. We work on image analysis. We work on designing the scanners themselves, those ultrasounds that allow you to see the face of your baby. Yeah, that's us biomedical engineers. You know, we've really made a big impact. And biomedical engineering, I do a lot in imaging, so that's what I'm focused on. But wheelchair design, I used to work in neural prosthetics, so these are limbs that can restore function to people that are Quadri paraplegic. I worked on retinal prosthesis to restore vision to people that are blind. These technologies that intersect with medicine, they're all kind of coming out of biomedical engineering, and it's absolutely crucial to what we do.  

Liz Wayne: Yeah, you know, if I answered the same thing, it would be a world without biomedical engineering. Wouldn't have my mother in it anymore, because my mom has kidney failure, and she would not have had dialysis, and she would not have had the opportunity to finally get a kidney transplant. None of those things would have happened, and I would have lost my mother a long time ago, and so many other people would have lost their moms and their dads or grandparents their children without this. So yeah, every day I'm thankful, and biomedical engineering is all around us. And you know, even on the funny note, you could also say, without biomedical engineering, my social media would be less funny. 

Jessica Winter: That's probably true. 

Liz Wayne: Thank you so much. This was an episode of office hours with Liz Wayne. If you have questions or ideas for a Podcast, episode email communications@bmes.org and also, if you want to connect about why you want to be a professor or why you're in grad school, also drop us a line. Let us know. We'd be happy to share it on the podcast. Follow us on our socials at bmessociety and our website for podcast details at bmes.org/podcast/office hours. Thanks, and see you next time you. 

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