"My name is Shirit Einav, I'm an assistant professor, we're at Stanford Medical School.
I grew up in a small town near Tel Aviv in Israel, none of my family members were scientists.
I had a mom who was a music teacher, and a dad who was a pilot in the Israeli Air Force
and then later become like a chemical engineer.
I played the flute for many years, I was a swimmer.
For a while I was on the fence about whether to pursue a career as a physician, because
I truly enjoy clinical medicine, and I still do.
When you take care of a patient it becomes 100% of exciting.
But I was failing patients in my clinic that were all young and otherwise healthy, but
they were all having very severe complications relating to their hepatitis C.
With that came a desire to really change things on a larger scale.
So what we focus on is trying to better understand interactions between viruses and their hosts,
particularly the human host.
And our overall goal is to try to identify host functions that are required by multiple
viruses.
And use those as potential targets for blood spectrum antiviral approaches.
We all come from different backgrounds, different countries, different schools, different philosophies
of teaching and learning, and different experiences and expertise, so it just, it really complements
the, you know, our daily experience.
It brings in different technologies, different ways of thinking and of operating.
It is an adventure, I must say, every project takes you to a different place, and you learn
new things.
So this is a very exciting period to do research.
We have technologies that we did not have before that allow us to ask new questions
and to be able to answer them in means that we were not able to do earlier.
[Speaker 2] I've been paying particular attention to this area, this particle area that often
gets a little bit ignored.
[Speaker 1] So today, if you look at most approved antivirals, they target viruses individually,
which is not a very scalable approach.
This takes a long time, 12 years to develop a drug, and also involves a very high cost
of over $2 billion per approved drug.
There are over 200 viruses that are known to cause diseases in humans, but there are
only 10 viruses for which we have approved antivirals available.
And of course we're working, the need is tremendous.
And when I started thinking about it I realized that we have to think differently, and just
targeting viruses individually is not going to solve this unmet need.
This approach is now being advanced into the clinic for the treatment of Zika virus, which
is on emerging with significant morbidity and mortality worldwide.
Particularly in tropical areas, but with global warming there is significant concern that
this will spread in this country.
We also show significant efficacy in Ebola models, so this was selected as an arm, sort
of an in-drawer protocol for outbreak researches, or new outbreaks that emerge.
The ability – the freedom that I get as a scientist to ask what ever question I'm
passionate about and answering, to be innovative, to discover – is what drives me.
So working as a physician scientist involves a lot of risk-taking and sometimes the greater
the risk the bigger the rewards are.
But risks is something, and failures, is something we encounter on a daily basis.
Most of what we do is open to failure, and it's really just persistence and the ability
to go through this process and then harvest fruit is what defines a good, you know, a
good physician scientist, and scientist in general.
I mean, it's not an easy path, you know?
Wearing these multiple hats, being a physician, being a scientist, a lab manager, a wife and
mother, a friend – sometimes it's just too many hats.
It can be overwhelming.
But finding this balance between career and life, you know, I think is a challenge, still
is, as a junior faculty I'm still working on doing this better.
When I come home after a long day, or a long visit, and look at my daughter in her eyes,
I know I'm doing the right thing because, you know, I'm following my dream and goals.
And it makes it easier.
So I would encourage people, particularly earlier in their career development, to really
take the potential to think big and take more risks.
I mean, some studies show that the biggest discoveries were actually happening earlier
during someone's career, so just don't be afraid, don't be afraid to think big.
There's not much to lose."