A Translator for Interdisciplinary Gene Therapy Research
Owen Fenton’s early interest in science started with a transformative moment: His chemistry professor offered him the chance to work in her lab during his undergraduate studies. “I had never done research before, but was thrilled for the opportunity and joined her group,” he recalls.
Now a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he leads his own lab in the Division of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics within the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, investigating RNA-based therapeutics. A key step along his pathway in research was the Amgen Scholars Program at the University of California Berkeley the summer after his junior year at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts.
“The Amgen Scholars Program was my first taste of seeing research at an R1 institution, and it was such a great program,” Fenton says. He applied to the program to gain additional research experience before applying to graduate school. “I was fortunate enough to be accepted into the program at UC Berkeley,” he says. “And it was awesome.”
Key highlights of that time were working with a postdoc mentor, informal meetups with the cohort on the weekends, and great people in the program and at the university, he says: “My peers in the program were these amazingly talented and creative scientists, and I was just blown away with how amazing they were.” He is still occasionally in touch with some members of his cohort from that summer.
The experience of working with different people in different types of research at UC Berkeley enabled Fenton to explore new types of science he had not thought about before. In retrospect, he says, he realizes that after the Amgen Scholars Program, he was able to connect his work in chemistry to new areas, like gene therapy. After getting his undergraduate degree, he went on to MIT, where he obtained a master’s degree and PhD, and did postdoctoral work, working with renowned scientists Daniel Anderson and Robert Langer on new delivery systems for gene therapy.
Fenton’s lab now, which is researching non-viral RNA medicines, is highly interdisciplinary. “We’ve had lab members with backgrounds in chemistry, biology, and engineering,” he says. Part of Fenton’s job, he says, is to be a translator of sorts, working to unify the skill sets of different team members: “In many ways, I view different fields almost as different languages.”
Fenton reflects now on his fortunate path in getting into science, especially as no one in his family had a science background, with his dad a pro-ice hockey player and his mom having worked in education. He is grateful for his many mentors, starting with the chemistry professor who got him into research during his undergraduate studies.
He now encourages students, including Amgen Scholars, to believe in themselves. “Give yourself a chance,” Fenton says. “Science requires creativity, rigor, passion, and resilience, and making sure you can be a part of the right team where you can also follow your interests is often paramount for success.”
Fenton says that his path has followed many avenues. “If you had asked me when I was an Amgen Scholar, ‘would I ever have thought I would do drug delivery?’ Maybe, but really, I thought I was going to be a small molecule medicinal chemist. And then I got involved in the gene therapy space. And you know, those genetic medicines require nanoparticle delivery vectors, so now I think about the chemistry of these. So the path evolved over time, but I was always fortunate to be able to pursue what I found interesting.”
