Today was my first day at Bavarian Nordic! Bavarian Nordic is a biotechnology company that specializes in vaccines. I will be spending the next two weeks in their clinical trials department learning about biostatistics and clinical trial managing. After struggling to find the right building, I finally found the “Bavarian Nordic” sign in front of some extremely intimidating frosted glass doors. I was rather early, so I waited outside until I saw another girl looking at the directory. I had a feeling she was the other intern from NC State. I think she had a feeling I was the high school intern too because she introduced herself. Kaitlin is very nice and passionate about statistics! We tried pushing and pulling the door for an embarrassing minute. Turns out we needed to be buzzed in. Once the lady at the front desk let us inside, we were greeted by Erika. Erika works in biostatistics and put together our whole agenda. After introducing us to everyone, she led us to the break room.
In the break room, she had set up a whole breakfast buffet to welcome us! It was very nice of her! Once we had finished eating and mingling, Erika set us up with desks and computers. However, there were some technical difficulties with sharing folders with me and Kaitlin because the IT guy is out. After we got all situated at our desks, we headed towards the conference room where we would spend the next couple hours. Ms. Handelsman started off by giving us a brief history of Bavarian Nordic and all the products it produces. Bavarian Nordic is widely known for its production of Imvamune, a vaccine for smallpox. The US stockpiles this vaccine in case smallpox gets weaponized. Bavarian Nordic also has many other vaccines still in the trial phase. The one I will be focusing on is Brachyury.
For lunch, we stopped at some food trucks because the power went out and there was no way to heat up our food. Once we ate, we went straight back to the conference room to meet with Janelle. Janelle is one of the leaders of the Brachyury project. She gave us some background on why it is being studied. Brachyury is a protein that is expressed by many types of tumors. Too much of it can make it hard to treat a tumor. Bavarian Nordic’s potential vaccine could increase survival rates in cancer because its goal is to cause a Brachyury-specific response by the immune system. I will continue to be researching and looking at data from the ongoing clinical trial in my next 2 weeks.
After a long day in the conference room, I was tasked with completing an online training for Clinical Research by the NIH. After a lot of reading, I finally passed and got my certificate. My certificate signaled the end of my very rewarding day. I am very excited to see what the rest of the week holds!
