Since last year, Jelena Pesic has been back at the Department of Experimental Science at Lund University in the role of industrial doctoral student. She did her Master’s project in this department 15 years ago under the supervision of Tomas Deierborg, who is now Head of Department.
Jelena Pesic is currently employed as Senior Research Scientist by AstraZeneca in Mölndal, and does most of her research at the company, while pursuing her doctoral studies at the same time.
– In addition to my employment, I’m following the mandatory courses at doctoral level at Lund University. Being an industrial doctoral student promotes personal development, provides a broader perspective on medical research and contributes to more collaboration with academia, industry and healthcare. I believe there are also greater opportunities to specialise and have your research published, compared with simply conducting research within the company,” explains Jelena Pesic.
– As an industrial doctoral student, you work at the company, and I believe this opens up opportunities for collaboration between different departments at the company, access to equipment and the latest technologies, and a bigger budget for the projects in the doctoral thesis,” she says.
Collaborative projects accelerate the pace of research, as together we can do things that we could not achieve individually
Jelena Pesic and her supervisor, Professor Lena Uller, were awarded SEK 2.5 million by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) for the project “T2 precision medicine for asthma: the right medicine for the right patient”, a collaboration between Lund University and AstraZeneca. Lena Uller’s research group has a biobank of primary bronchial cells from patients with asthma at different degrees of severity. The project will feature the use of these cells and respiratory viruses to study how a new asthma drug being developed by AstraZeneca works.
– Since Jelena was accepted at the height of the coronavirus crisis last spring, our collaboration has been limited to digital meetings. The collaboration is intended to build on the research we’ve conducted in Lund, where we’ve shown that bronchial cells in the respiratory tracts of patients with asthma have a compromised immune system for common cold viruses, as well as an overproduction of a protein, cytokine, that initiates T2 inflammation in the respiratory tracts. We want to see if we can address this imbalance in the immune system by conducting experiments with a new biological drug that has been modified so that it can be inhaled into the lungs. Modern biological drugs are often administered systemically, i.e. they affect the whole body and not just the respiratory tracts. We now have a unique opportunity to investigate the effect of this substance in our cell systems and animal models, explains Lena Uller, who believes that collaborations between industry and academia are important.
– We in academia don’t have the opportunity to develop medicines ourselves, but we can have ideas about how new therapies might work. Collaborative projects accelerate the pace of research, as together we can do things that we could not achieve individually, says Lena Uller, and Jelena Pesic agrees:
– I believe that we can learn from one another. We have different experiences, and I believe that universities have more freedom for exploratory research, investigative research, compared with companies. The research results can benefit the company or the organisation, and researchers acquire knowledge of important development areas and access to real-life problems and ideas to work with.
Are there any drawbacks to collaborations like this?
–The bureaucracy relating to the legal agreements that have to be in place before you start a collaboration is pretty complicated. And new issues emerge within the project that can require new agreements, says Lena Uller.
The researchers hope that their collaboration will result in better treatment for patients.
– A new way of being able to treat asthma and COPD by strengthening the immune system more effectively using inhaled biological drugs, concludes Lena Uller.
