© DUSTIN FENSTERMACHERYvonne Saenger majored in Russian at Harvard University, but, realizing that “medicine would allow me to have an impact on people’s lives in a way the humanities wouldn’t,” she also took a full suite of premed courses, then headed to Columbia University for medical school. After her younger sister was diagnosed with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, she homed in on oncology. (Her sister is in remission and doing just fine now, Saenger notes.)
At med school, Saenger spent some time in the lab of Leonard Chess, where she worked on regulatory T cells in the context of treating autoimmune disease. It was interesting work, Saenger says, but “I was fascinated by the flip side of it: you could also activate your cells to kill off the lymphoma.”
During her fourth year of med school, she again returned to the lab, this time working with Alan Houghton and Jedd Wolchok at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) on assays to measure T-cell activation. “[Saenger] was very, very motivated; very, very passionate about making the most of her time in the laboratory,” Wolchok says. He recalls one occasion when Saenger came into the lab at night, after everyone else ...
