Breaking Barriers: Dr. Shannan Rossi on Viruses and the Business of Science

Speaker 1: 0:11

This is a podcast about one health the idea that the health of humans, animals, plants and the environment that we all share are intrinsically linked.

Speaker 2: 0:19

Coming to you from the University of Texas Medical Branch in the Galveston National Laboratory.

Speaker 1: 0:23

This is infectious science. We're enthusiasm for science.

Speaker 2: 0:27

This is contagious, dr Sweetenham.

Speaker 1: 0:32

Hi, good to see you again, good to see you too. Matt.

Speaker 2: 0:38

All right.

Speaker 1: 0:40

Now we know who we are, yeah, so it's good to see you back in the podcast room.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Yeah, it's been a little while.

Speaker 1: 0:49

It has, and we are so lucky today because we are joined by a friend, a colleague, dr Shannon Rossi.

Speaker 2: 0:54

Hello Hi.

Speaker 1: 0:58

From our department of pathology and associate professor and recently minted five six months ago MBA.

Speaker 3: 1:04

I know right.

Speaker 1: 1:06

PhD, MBA those are not always things we hear listed together. We're going to get into that.

Speaker 3: 1:12

We're going to talk about it, but thanks for coming.

Speaker 1: 1:17

Oh, thanks for having me. It's fun to be in the closet. Yeah, we are excited to have you here. We're excited to get to explore a little bit about your life and your career and some of the science that you do.

Speaker 2: 1:24

Can I just say I'm especially excited to have you here because when I first started at UTMB, my very first rotation, Shannon, was actually a postdoc in the lab. So some of your research interests and the research interests of some of the other people in the lab at that time were really really fundamental in me forming my own research interest. So I'm excited to have you here today.

Speaker 3: 1:47

Oh, that's really sweet to hear. I still have your lab notebook if you want to back.

Speaker 2: 1:50

Oh, now I don't, you can keep that.

Speaker 1: 1:52

I'm going to keep that in mind for the next few days.

Speaker 2: 1:54

That's going to fetch a price on the open market?

Speaker 1: 1:57

I hope not Awesome. Well, shannon, tell us a little bit about you. Know what you're doing here right now? What are you doing at UTMB? What's?

Speaker 3: 2:03

your work all about? Yeah, so my lab has two basic projects. The first is we're interested in creating countermeasures for viruses that are transmitted by mosquitoes, so these are viruses like traditionally. I've studied what's not a virus. This isn't something I do now, but I do study a cousin of her Zika virus and alpha viruses. Yeah, we remember that. Yeah, 2016 was a fun year for a lot of us, yeah. And then there's another virus called Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus and we do a couple of antiviral studies to try to figure out how do we combat that infection once it sets in. That's something you don't really hear a lot about, but people who grew up in the 70s, the 80s especially those people that would live in Texas, up and down the Mexico border with Texas, especially around 1971, they would have been very familiar with this.

Speaker 2: 2:54

Right, Because there were pretty large outbreaks of Venezuelan equine encephalitis at that time. Right.

Speaker 3: 3:00

Yeah, to the point where ranchers really got concerned, and some of the vaccine work that we've done is directly stemmed from those epidemics.

Speaker 2: 3:07

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 3:08

It's been pretty quiet.

Speaker 2: 3:08

We really haven't heard much from the 90s Well correct me if I'm wrong, but it's one of the viruses I always talk about insect-borne pathogens is causing epidemics on a cycle like with West Nile. It's a 10-year cycle, like 8-12-year cycle, but with V, with Venezuelan equine encephalitis, it's a longer cycle, right? It's like more of like the 15-20-year cycle, Is that right?

Speaker 3: 3:30

Sort of more or less, and if you look at it that way, we're certainly due for one.

Speaker 2: 3:34

Right, because the last one would have been the one in Peru which was in the 2000s right.

Speaker 1: 3:41

Around there.

Speaker 3: 3:42

I think there was some 2005 or 2006 or something right. Yeah, there was a little bit of activity in Mexico, I think last year or the year before, but nothing that really took off to an international concern. But you're in the field, your ears perk up and say, wait, what's going on? Yeah, so it's something that's always on our radar but it doesn't really reach the national levels that people certainly with Zika they were very familiar about.

Speaker 2: 4:07

A lot of times when we have things like COVID going on, a lot of other things get missed and things that normally would catch national attention. Kind of our ability to absorb that information. We just don't have the tolerance for it or the drive to listen to whatever minor outbreaks are happening, because they're so minor in relation to COVID. But if COVID wasn't there we would have been thinking they were much bigger maybe.

Speaker 3: 4:30

Yeah, you can certainly hit virus fatigue Exactly. Remember, right after COVID certainly we were all tired. We were tired For sure. Then you started hearing about monkeypox. You go oh my God, what is this? We can't do this again. We just finished one. Can we breathe a little? Right, there's always something that pops up on the radar. You search, you'll find.

Speaker 1: 4:49

Yeah, I had a conversation with a colleague who works mostly in East Africa when the Sudan virus cases were cropping up in Uganda. She started to get all these questions about it and she said you know, guys, I have time in my life for one pandemic. You're right, I think there's that virus fatigue. But it's really cool that your lab is working on stuff that right now is not active but we know could become active again. Right, how do you keep that narrative going? Because I think that's one of those big challenges in science is that we tend to be very reactive. All the money, all the funding, all the interest comes like when there's a pandemic or there's an outbreak and we really need to do something about it. But in the intervening period, one of the reasons I think we've, at least around here, done pretty well is because we have experts like yourself and others who have been working on some of these viruses even during the quiet times. So how do you maintain that energy and keep that in the eyes of, especially, funders? How do you write that narrative that this is still important?

Speaker 3: 5:47

Yeah, and it can be a bit of a tricky balance. Right, because you don't want to be reactionary, you don't want to continue to fan the flames per se just to increase the importance of our personal research. But a lot of time, unless the research is done before it becomes really critically important, then we're caught flat-footed. So like, for example, when Zika hit in 2016,. We had these viruses that were sitting around in vials, in the freezer, but there was no real impetus for us to need to study it because it hadn't really done anything of interest to people that pay the bills and are funders. So then, when the epidemic hit, they said how is it possible that you know almost nothing about this virus? And they said well, we know a little bit of something, but unless the funding is there and the drive like you've identified, matt is there, it can be very difficult. So oftentimes you will take a virus that you really are interested in and you will just study it and the answers that you get to questions that you have will drive the next set of questions and you'll just keep going and going until you amass a body of knowledge that other people in the field can ping themselves off of, take it run with it and you never know where your research is going to end up, who is going to be able to benefit from it Years and years down the line. Some of the initial studies that were done with Zika were done back in the 50s. So we, as researchers in 2016, immediately went to the research and said, oh my God, what's already been done. We start pulling things up that were done 60, 70 years prior and said, oh, this is fantastic, we don't have to start from scratch. So I think keeping this in mind also can be very important. Sometimes, also, the viruses we study can be used as surrogates for other viruses. So just because you have studied, let's say, zika in particular, that doesn't mean that there aren't lessons that could be applied to other viruses that other people are interested in really studying and understanding the diseases that they can cause Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 7:40

Yeah, before we push the record button, we were talking and you were saying some really interesting stuff about places where the viruses could hide and your interest in that, and I found that very interesting because I think people who are out there may not realize that if you have a respiratory virus or you have a vector-borne disease virus like a Zika or a Dengue or whatever sometimes they can infect other parts of the body or they can find areas where the immune system is not quite as robust and that can have effects on whether the virus can actually keep spreading after they're no longer symptomatic. Can you say a few things about that and maybe say whether I'm wrong?

Speaker 2: 8:17

about how I'm describing it because I might be.

Speaker 3: 8:21

No, you're absolutely right. So the second part of what my lab does is we're interested in understanding how viruses can cause testicular infection. Thank you, Zika. I didn't start off my career wanting to go into this field in particular but this is an example of where the science will take you, and you'll start to amass data and, before you know it, this is the field of research you find yourself in, and it just becomes very interesting. So one thing we found during the Zika epidemic is we noticed that people who were traveling from the sites of the epidemic back to countries where there was no epidemic, there was transmission occurring, which is weird If you don't have the mosquitoes. We thought there could be no transmission of Zika. Well, the more curious you stay and the more questions you ask, the more information you're going to amass. And so we started going back into the literature and turns out there was a CDC researcher that had kind of already been experiencing this. I'm not going to shout out who, but there's a very interesting story about this too. He was doing some research in Senegal, came down with the disease, came back, gave it to his wife Now there were no mosquitoes in Colorado at this time that could vector Zika, but he hadn't been with his wife for a while. And so what happens when two people love each other? You can see where this is going right. So it's transmission. How to have occurred somehow? So they looked at all of the possible body fluids. So you consider saliva, tear, sweat, semen came up and there was the report and I think CNN was talking about this for a while too where Zika could possibly be sexually transmitted. When you think about viruses that are transmitted by mosquitoes, sexual transmission is a weird one that doesn't come up on your radar. And then you're studying this because it's very interesting. It's not something that's supposed to happen, which of course means, oh, we have to study this. We have to figure out what's going on here, you start to pull back the curtain and you realize wow, it's not just Zika that does this. So, like HIV, mumps, Marburg, Ebola a whole litany of infectious diseases have the capability to go to the testes. So even though we study Zika, a lot of the lessons that we're learning here can be applied to other viruses as well.

Speaker 2: 10:37

Right, and from a technical standpoint. I've heard that it's really hard to do any studies involving semen because it's really cytotoxic. It's a really hard fluid to work with. Is that true or am I just so?

Speaker 3: 10:50

I haven't had very much experience working with those types of samples. Most of what we do is small animal research to understand how does the virus get from, let's say, the side of a mosquito bite to the testes in order to be sexually transmitted or cause damage. But you bring up a very interesting point what is the true burden of sexual transmission for a virus like Zika? The answer is we don't know. We don't know because those samples really don't exist. During the epidemic and let's say the SARS, covid pandemic, people kind of in survival mode. They're not really thinking about these scientific questions if it doesn't relate to their ability to just get by. So oftentimes we don't have the samples that are collected during these periods of epidemics and pandemics to be able to study later that. And oftentimes these are not lethal diseases that we're studying, so biopsies usually aren't available. So translating what we see, let's say, in a small mouse model which is one of the best models we have, to be able to study this to something that's clinically relevant sometimes can be a challenge. Yeah for sure.

Speaker 2: 11:58

I've heard another investigator who was doing semen studies and the only reason I brought it up is because they said it was really hard to detect it at all in semen, just because there's so many proteases that will destroy the cells that you're working with. So you're trying to look for evidence of virus infection, but the sample itself is killing the cells, so it just makes it a little bit more difficult to work with. So even if you do have the clinical samples, it can still be really challenging to get the answer to the question you're asking, just because it's not always as easy as collecting samples. Yeah, there's technical challenges.

Speaker 3: 12:31

So what do you look for in the sample that you receive? So normally we'll receive a sample and we'll put it onto like a Vero cell monolayer and look for evidence of viral infection. This way, sometimes it might be easier just to take that sample and pop open everything that's in it and look for evidence of the nucleic acid of the virus. Like with RT-PCR or something like this. They measure two very different things Exactly, but sometimes it's easier to detect one than the other, right for sure.

Speaker 2: 12:58

There's probably strengths and limitations to both approach. There always is Yep.

Speaker 1: 13:03

I love it. I found that really interesting. I think we'll get back into some of the day-to-day and the day-in-life type stuff. What kind of got you into all this, into this world of virology, of science? We were talking a little bit beforehand how desperately we need more women representation science, especially in leadership positions. Now you have an MBA, so that means you know everything there is to know about business.

Speaker 3: 13:25

That's exactly what that means. But can you say a little bit?

Speaker 1: 13:28

of. Can you talk a little bit about kind of your origin story and what kind of got you into all this work?

Speaker 3: 13:32

Yeah, but let me turn it around. When I was, let's say, six, what do you think I wanted to be when I grew up?

Speaker 1: 13:38

Let's see, I'm going to date myself. I was going to say, like Mighty Mouse, I'm not that old. That's a good one, mighty Mouse.

Speaker 3: 13:45

I mean you're close. No, no guesses, Daniel.

Speaker 2: 13:48

I think I actually know your story, so I can't really guess. Was it a tooth fairy? I?

Speaker 3: 13:54

don't want to put magic in it.

Speaker 1: 13:56

It was a tooth fairy.

Speaker 3: 13:57

I love it. I was convinced when I was really young Because I had a great imagination that I was going to be the tooth fairy when I grew up and it was because you thought there could be viral reservoirs and teeth.

Speaker 1: 14:06

Oh yeah, I had that for thought.

Speaker 2: 14:08

Obviously.

Speaker 3: 14:09

Now she was magical and she got to fly and I just really wanted to fly when I was young, which makes zero sense. I think it makes perfect sense. I know it's still a lot of fun. But I kind of fell into science by attrition. I always just like science and I knew I was going to end up somewhere in the sciences. It was a school teacher that I had. She pushed us really hard. It was an AP biology class and I think we were in the 10th grade, 10th or 11th, one of the two and it was just really interesting the things that we would talk about in class. I remember thinking for the first time about the immune response and the things that an immune response has to do to keep you healthy. Yeah, I'm thinking how the hell does the cell know how to do this? It has no brain. This is really interesting. Oh my God, wait, wait, wait. There's more than one kind of immune cell and my teenage mind was absolutely blown. So I thought I was going to do something with this and it wasn't until I took an internship over the summer I think it was between my freshman and junior year of college. I did an internship at Wyeth Erst, which was in my hometown of Pearl River, new York, and it was for a vaccine branch of their pharmaceutical company. We were working on Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus vectors. That's kind of where that whole thing started. Yeah, and it just was really interesting. The virus work. Yeah, well, I guess I can do this. So I tried it on for a couple of months and it just stuck. So I've been here ever since and it's been a fun ride. I tried out genetics for a little while microbiology, like I flirted with doing bacterial work, but now a virus is. They got my bum apart, yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:52

I'm stuck. That's so funny because I went into science because of my AP biology teacher, so it's so funny how these early influences yeah. Do teachers really know that they have such a big impact? I don't know. I hope so. I hope they do?

Speaker 3: 16:04

I don't know.

Speaker 1: 16:04

Why don't you tell us, Dr Sweetenham?

Speaker 2: 16:07

Professor, yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:08

Do you're having an impact?

Speaker 2: 16:10

With great power. With great power, it becomes great responsibility, it's true.

Speaker 1: 16:12

I mean, I think you don't always know when you're impacting someone, but sometimes it's just showing up and being interested yourself. Do you think you bring that now? You have young learners in your lab, you have people coming in and doing internships with you. Is that kind of something that you try to bring?

Speaker 3: 16:27

I try to. You would have to ask them if I'm successful. I don't want to. That's the next episode. I rise them right and stay tuned.

Speaker 1: 16:35

And we've got some of them right behind the curtain. I try.

Speaker 3: 16:41

I think to instill on wonder in someone is really important, especially if you're going to stay in this career for the long haul. Right, because it can be very arduous. I have so many notebooks in my office that are full of data, most of which are null data. Some of the greatest characteristics you can be as a scientist include curious and persistent, because a lot of what we do doesn't work and you have to continue to think about things, try things out, and failure is a great teacher. So if you're really not big into failing, you either get used to it or you maybe go do something else. So I try to. When I talk to, young students say it is one of the coolest things in the entire world to see something for the first time as a person that no one else in the world has ever seen. Right, that is really amazing.

Speaker 2: 17:30

Yeah, and I love what you said about cultivating awe in students, because there's this really interesting. She said was it a physicist or an astronomer? But her name was Rebecca Elson and she passed away kind of recently, but she was also a poet and she wrote about exactly all the things you're talking about is the scientist's responsibility to honor awe and about the significance of failure in our lives as scientists and how it's a place of inspiration and not discouragement. Yeah, that's an incredible way of looking at it.

Speaker 1: 17:58

I think you have to be in that right ecosystem where people appreciate that actually failure is part of the process, and we're going to just kind of let you keep doing it, work hard, you're on the right path, you're doing the right kind of question.

Speaker 3: 18:10

Yeah, try not to fail the same way twice. Maybe you didn't learn what you were supposed to do the first time. But failure is such an integral part of the learning process that if it wasn't for failure, it wouldn't teach you what you are not doing correctly or what you're not looking at in the right way, or maybe it is exactly where you're supposed to be. You're just looking at it from the wrong angle, right?

Speaker 1: 18:32

Yeah, if you decide you're going to do science, you're now doing all this really really cool work, so your day to day not necessarily like well. First I respond to emails.

Speaker 3: 18:42

It does. It starts at 5 am. Yeah, starts with emails. It starts with emails.

Speaker 1: 18:45

But can you say a little bit about some of the maybe active work that you have, maybe some recent experience you've had, either with success or failure?

Speaker 3: 18:54

Well, huge success is just finishing up the MBA. Congrats, by the way, thank you. Speaking of tenacity, I think it's important going back to the curiosity, keep remaining curious, but then realize that you're never going to stop learning Right, and with learning does come a lot of those failures, but sometimes a good success and a good win will keep you sustained for a long time. It's been a while since I've done an actual experiment in the lab. This is something that I really want to get back into doing, because I do miss for lack of a better way to put it moving pipettes around and being able to design an experiment, see it all the way through and then gather the results and the data at the end of it. Now I have a very active program and the people that work alongside with me in my lab. They are able to do this, so I'm living vicariously through them. Yeah, and it is one of the most satisfying things again when they come up and say, oh my God, look what I found. Right, that's amazing. But I think when the success has come, you take a hold of them, because sometimes they don't come as often as you want them to. Yeah for sure. So celebrate it whenever you do get a chance.

Speaker 1: 20:00

You and I were talking at some point when you were in your MBA and oh yeah, exactly those dark days Was I tired and surly. You were just tired, yeah.

Speaker 3: 20:11

You were never, surly.

Speaker 1: 20:13

But one of the things you were mentioning was how stimulating it was to be learning alongside different people. Yeah, you were always kind of incubated in the science environment and then now you're with some business people or people who had worked in marketing or they worked, you know, they're just in a very different sector. Their way of looking at the world was very different. And can you say a little bit about what the process of studying this MBA because again, this was your curiosity, right you can maybe tell us a little about what made you want to do that and then what some of your observations were about being part of that learning environment?

Speaker 3: 20:44

Yeah, and if I don't hit all of the answers to your questions, just remind me of them. But my parents when I was younger really instilled in me this love of learning, this deep-seated curiosity and the expectation that if you have it, you're going to seek it out. So they were always very encouraging of go ahead and take all those AP classes and if you get a, b, it's okay because you tried. You didn't settle for the thing that was the easier A. You were striving, you were constantly pushing yourself and you're always trying to make yourself in that realm of being a little bit uncomfortable because that's where the growth occurs? Yeah, absolutely. It can be very easy for us, especially when we start to get older, to sit back on the things that we're very comfortable with, like, oh, I've done plaque assays, I don't need to learn this new technique. A plaque assay will work completely fine and I'm just going to do this until I retire or whatever. And so part of that was the reason I decided to get the MBA to challenge myself, to make sure that I still had the capacity to want the drive to learn something completely different. But also, the more I started to think about it, the more I realized science is a business. When I was younger like grad school days back in the day I thought this was very altruistic. If you had a really good question, of course you were going to be able to get funding for it. Of course somebody was going to be interested in it, because it's science, it's the pursuit of this knowledge that has nothing to do with our thoughts or feelings. So it was noble and it was pure and you should be able to study it for studying its sake. Well, the real world isn't quite like that, and someone's going to have to pay the bills at the end of the day. I think the first lesson I really learned about this was when I was a graduate student studying how to make a vaccine against West Nile virus, and at that point it was maybe 2006, 2007. So we were kind of right off the heels of it emerging in North America in 1999. And we were still tracking it every year. It was, first and foremost, on a lot of people's minds. You go up to an average person on the street and said I study West Nile. They were, oh, I know what that is. That's important. Why don't we have a vaccine? Great question why don't we have a vaccine? Well, because maybe the market's not quite there for it. So once you start to then understand that science isn't necessarily as noble of pursuit as I thought it was and that there's going to be money involved, then that brings the business aspect into it. So how is it that you can communicate your idea to be able to get money to study the other things that we need to study because they are of great human importance? I thought was something that I needed to augment my learning about, and I did get to meet a lot of really interesting people as part of my MBA class, because some of them were MDs, some of them were marketers. There were a couple of CPAs and a lot of them were from oil and gas, because we are situated right next to Houston, texas. So it was very good to remind myself that I don't have to sit in my little micro chasm of science all the time. There's an entire world of people out there that have different ways of thinking, different interactions with science. I'm sure that we had some people and I went through during COVID. They were like, oh, covid vaccine, I don't know about that, and I'm over here like, oh, okay, now we're in the realm of like science and policy and everything that I'd never thought I was going to have to become involved in. But I'm happy for these conversations because science can't be performed in a vacuum. Only some of the science we do is tax funded, so we are beholden to the people that ultimately pay the bills, right.

Speaker 1: 24:18

That's such a great answer. What an adventure. What a very cool person you are. We're really lucky that you're here and that you're doing the work that you're doing and that you are maintaining an energy and a dedication to this field which I think everybody in the world now knows what a virus is, no matter what. They know what a vaccine is, and now we need folks like yourself more than ever. So I think that's really great. I've really enjoyed getting to talk to you. Do you have any final thoughts, like for anybody who might be on the fence about their career, out there, thinking about what they want to do in their life and what they might want to bring into the world, any advice or guidance from Dr Shannon Rossi?

Speaker 3: 24:56

Oh, I don't know if I'm the best person to give any life advice, but I think if you find what you're good at, what the world needs and what your passion is, you can probably make a really good, fulfilling living from it. If science is something that you are interested in, then there are a couple of things that you can do to set yourself up for future success. When I was younger, I thought scientists. They stayed at the bench, they wore pretty lab coats, they worked in the dark and they moved beakers of colorful liquid back and forth, because this is kind of what popular media shows us scientists do.

Speaker 1: 25:29

That sounds exactly right. That's accurate right.

Speaker 3: 25:31

Yeah yeah, yeah, with the mood lighting and everything else all the time, our labs are very well lit. One thing I didn't appreciate was how much communication there would be in science. Right, because the stereotype of a scientist is this loner, geeky person that just kind of is by themselves doing science. Yeah, but yet here we are in the podcast closet, talking about how I got to where I am. You guys have been doing this for how many episodes now? Many, much.

Speaker 1: 25:59

A lot. Ten. Our producer has said ten.

Speaker 3: 26:02

So you're seasoned pros at this point. Why did you start off doing this Me, I mean in general because communication is important, right, right, right, right yeah. So the ability to articulate your thoughts both in written word but also in speech is really important. One of the most critical things I think I did and now looking back in retrospect I'm surprised. I had the forethought to do it, but it sounds really good when I tell it in the story Is in college I decided each semester I was going to do something that sucked and something that was fun. So for fun, I took beekeeping and I love it and I hope to eventually get back a high on bees one day. The thing that sucked was oral speech and debate. Oh my god, it was so nerve-wracking. But the return on being able to do that back when I had the ability to make a bunch of mistakes and it didn't really impact my career so I could screw up as much as I could and got the comfort to sit in front of a crowd and just say words it was really, really valuable. There's a lot of writing, there's a lot of talking and the better you can be at this early on, the easier it's going to be for you later.

Speaker 2: 27:13

Yeah, definitely. I think that's great advice.

Speaker 3: 27:15

Yeah, that, and travel.

Speaker 2: 27:16

A lot of travel, a lot of travel, yeah it is all about the teams.

Speaker 1: 27:19

It's all about the communication. That was great messages and sometimes my house. We've had a recurrent bee infestation, so next time we have to bring the guys over to excavate the bees, then I'm just going to call them and say, hey, I got a place, you can bring them.

Speaker 3: 27:34

Yeah, shannon's house, shannon's house, the cats are going to be thrilled Awesome.

Speaker 1: 27:40

Well, this has been great. Any thoughts from you? Like the sweet them.

Speaker 2: 27:43

I think we're good to go Say thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you.

Speaker 1: 27:47

This has been fun. Shannon, thank you so much for spending some time with us.

Speaker 2: 27:49

Thank you both, bye.

Speaker 1: 28:21

So we'll see you next time for a new episode, and in the meantime, stay happy stay healthy, stay interested.