While working towards his engineering degree at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile, Matías Vergara Alvarez, MS, played a central role in caring for his parents through their cancer diagnoses — a time in his life that shaped his career.
“I was interested in engineering, but I made a complete switch in my job because of losing both my parents to cancer,” Vergara Alvarez says. “It motivated me to change the kind of impact I wanted to make in the world.”
After losing his mother in 2013 to triple negative breast cancer, an aggressive and fast-growing breast cancer, and his father in 2014 to liposarcoma, a rare cancer that forms in the body’s fatty tissue, Vergara Alvarez finished his degree in engineering and operation research, which uses mathematical optimization — a field that combines problem-solving decision-making with mathematical reasoning — and returned to school in 2020 for a masters in computer science and machine learning with a focus on cancer research.
Computational work from a new perspective
About two years after his parents died, Vergara Alvarez visited Boston to see a friend. Fortuitously, he attended a local seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on machine learning and computational biology.
“I was amazed at what I learned,” Vergara Alvarez says. “The talk covered how diseases originate with specific variants that are associated with particular phenotypes or traits, and I just had to know more.”
Vergara Alvarez’s had a foundation in mathematical modeling and optimization but was new to cancer research.
He began knocking on doors to pursue this path.
“My first approach to getting involved was when I came back to Santiago for my thesis, where I could develop a method that finds biomarkers that can be used as clues to predict drug responses in cancer of the brain like glioblastoma,” Vergara Alvarez says. “I really wanted this path.”
His computational skills got him in the door with the Van Allen Lab led by Eliezer Van Allen, MD, chief of the Division of Population Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which helps make cancer medicine more precise through clinical computational tools.
“This was a wonderful opportunity to be in the network of so many researchers that are in the frontier of research,” Vergara Alvarez says. “My extraordinary mentor helped shape my scientific mindset.”
Building a career with intention
In the Van Allen lab, Vergara Alvarez worked as a computational biologist where he used data to interpret cancer genomes, create new ways to analyze cancer therapy data, and contribute to the future of cancer research.
In one project, Vergara Alvarez worked on the relationship between prostate cancer and genetic makeup of cancer cells and therapeutic therapies. For example, the team investigated how targeted cancer therapies like PARP inhibitors could be an effective genomic strategy for treating prostate cancer tumors that can’t repair DNA mutations.
After four years at Dana-Farber, Vergara Alvarez returned to Chile to spearhead the development of a clinical computational oncology program. The program aims to use cancer genomics to improve patient care.
“There are different lines of research, and my work involves clinical genomics, and I love what I do because the work has a direct implication,” Vergara Alvarez says. “This work is personal to me but also helps change lives.”
Incredible how personal milestones mark the way and how listening to the vocation always takes you further. Congratulations to Matías Vergara Álvarez for the road travelled, and a lot of encouragement on the way ahead. May the strength of your parents always accompany you!