Beyond Basic Research

Deepta Bhattacharya remembers the mouse that humbled him. An ordinary mouse, in most respects, save a single missing gene. And Bhattacharya was going to figure out what that missing gene meant.

This was early in his days as a professor of pathology and immunology at Washington University in St. Louis. He was hot to trot, eager to impress. So he has this mouse with the missing gene, and immediately he can see the differences between it and a normally functioning mouse. 

“All these differences that no one had ever reported before,” he says — differences pertaining to immune function and inflammation; differences that had real potential for application down-stream. “It’s like, ‘yes, jackpot,’ right?”

But the further Bhattacharya and his colleagues got into their research, the less apparent the results became. “It turned out there was another mutation in the mouse no one knew about,” he says. “And it turned out that all these things we were finding [were] because of the other gene, not the gene that we thought we were studying.” Like that, Bhattacharya’s daydream of the early-career scientist quickly and miraculously discovering insights previously unseen — vanished.

“I think the longer you stay in this field, the more humble you get, because you just accumulate all of these instances where you were sure that you were right, but then you do the experiment and it’s obvious you’re wrong,” he says. “And I think that’s one of the things that makes it so much fun, because you can’t be sure, and it’s actually always — almost always — worth it to do that basic experiment.”

In a way, it was Bhattacharya’s uncertainty — or at least his comfort with the exploratory nature of it — that led him to immunology in the first place. Born at the University Medical Center here at the U of A and raised on the city’s east side (“I remember the monsoons,” he says), he moved to Indiana after his father took a job teaching math at Indiana University in Bloomington, where Bhattacharya later went to college.

Initially, he was going to be a chemistry major, but a quirk in the department’s language requirements — they would only accept French, German or Russian, but Bhattacharya had studied Spanish — led him to biochemistry instead. “Requirements weren’t dramatically different, but obviously it required taking at least molecular biology, genetics, a couple of other things,” he says. “And I thought, ‘You know? I kind of like this better.’”

He ended up in a doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley that allowed him to study aspects of both chemistry and biology. Immunology — the study of how our bodies use their own resources to defend against infection and disease — made an impression on him because it seemed like the path from lab research to real-life treatment was relatively quick. “That you can explore your basic curiosity,” as he put it, “but anything you find has a fairly short route to the clinic.”

Even then, though, Bhattacharya noticed the way the conventions of academia could be limiting, or at least foreshorten the horizon of how work could be applied. “The term is a little overused, but it’s called the Valley of Death,” he says. Research is done; discoveries are made. But academics aren’t evaluated on their ability to develop therapies, they’re evaluated on their ability to publish papers and procure grants. So they do that instead. “And a lot of great discoveries just die.”

It took the coronavirus pandemic to show him what it might be like to work outside the bubble. He was back in Tucson now, a professor in the Immunobiology department at the College of Medicine – Tucson, suddenly drafted into helping the university come up with a response to a problem no one fully understood.

“What many of us realized at that point is that we didn’t have any training in public communication at all,” he says. “At the beginning, I think I was pretty bad, to be honest.” Then came a suggestion from his wife: Why don’t you just say what you think? “And I was like, OK, I’m just going to do that.”

Lines of communication opened up. Suddenly he was meeting with liaisons from state government and the Office of General Counsel — people who scientists like Bhattacharya don’t ordinarily bump into. “When you recognize that you’re not just trying to jockey for credit on paper, but that the things you’re doing have real implications for how safe people will be on campus, how the university is going to manage this crisis, it enforces a different mindset,” he says.

That promise of real implications is something Bhattacharya is hoping to convey in his new role as executive direct of the Center for Advanced Molecular and Immunological Therapies, or CAMI.

“I’ve been involved in some degree of drug development at this point, and that almost always goes through startup companies,” he says. In other words, the lab over here, and the business over there. Part of his vision with CAMI is to bridge the gap between the two such that scientists have clearer paths — not to mention better incentives — for getting their work into the world, where it can make an impact on patients’ lives.

“That was one of the promises that we made to our state government. And I intend to fulfill it.” 

He’s already seen the culture shift a little. “I see talks being given by academic scientists,” he says. “And, you know, sometimes we’ll have to put up our financial disclosures and things like that. And it used to be that people would rush through it because it was something to be embarrassed about.” Science was pure, business was dirty. “Now, what I see is people are proud of it,” he says. “Because what it means is that you’re actually trying to move some-thing forward into the clinic, or a diagnostic, or something that has direct implications for human health.”

Listening to Bhattacharya talk, you get the sense of someone trying to reconcile the best qualities of divergent approaches the way one might make a stronger rope by braiding different materials: the experimental nature of academia with the bottom line of the entrepreneur, the process of research with the product of applied medicine.

“Leadership isn’t something I’d ever thought of,” he says. “If this were just, like, ‘OK, we want you to be the chair of an existing department’? Not a chance.” In CAMI, he sees the opportunity to do something new. “A real experiment,” he says. “I mean, hopefully it works, right? But that’s the fun part.”

Fun? For some, maybe. Plenty others might prefer the comfort of a sure bet. In the meantime, he’s preparing. What’ll it be like? What changes await? He’ll probably have to dress a little differently, he says, tugging at the neck of his polo shirt. Whatever happens, he’s ready.