Deborah Plana profile picture

Deborah Plana, PhD

MD Candidate at Harvard Medical School and MIT

Education

Medical Scientist Training Program, MD-PhD

Harvard Medical School and MIT
2017 - current

Doctor of Philosophy in Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology

Harvard University
2019 - 2022

Bachelor of Science in Biological Engineering with a Minor in Statistics and Data Science

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2013 - 2017

About me

I am an MD-PhD student in the Harvard‐MIT Health Sciences and Technology program. I earned my PhD in 2022 from the Harvard Systems Biology program under the supervision of Peter Sorger from the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and Adam Palmer from the UNC School of Medicine. My dissertation was titled “Clinical Trial Data Science to Advance Precision Oncology”.

My research enables enhanced analysis of clinical trial results, helping identify promising new treatments with smaller sample sizes as compared to traditional approaches, advance therapies to the clinic that would otherwise be overlooked, and discover drug-response biomarkers. You can find out more about my research through my Google Scholar and ORCID profiles.

Selected media coverage of my thesis work and of projects in response to the COVID-19 pandemic includes articles in Harvard GSAS, Yahoo Finance, HealthExec, Healthline Media, Harvard Medicine News, and Harvard Crimson.

I am grateful for generous support from the NIH Medical Scientist Training Program and the NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service F30 Award.

Previously, I earned my undergraduate degree in Biological Engineering at MIT with a minor in Statistics and Data Science and worked in the lab of Douglas Lauffenburger.

Projects

Greater Boston Pandemic Fabrication Team (PanFab) - Founded and co-led ~100-person volunteer effort to respond to medical supply shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Resulting data, publications, and device designs are publicly available.
Cancertrials.io - Imputed individual participant data (IPD) from >150 published oncology research clinical trials (RCTs). Data and analysis can be downloaded or viewed interactively.

Selected Publications

*Denotes equal contributions

  • Cancer patient survival can be parametrized to improve trial precision and reveal time-dependent therapeutic effects. (Nature Communications, 2022).
    • Plana, D., Fell, G., Alexander, B. M., Palmer, A. C. *, & Sorger, P. K. *
  • Independent Drug Action in Combination Therapy, Implications for Precision Oncology. (Cancer Discovery, 2022).
    • Plana, D.*, Palmer, A. C. *, & Sorger, P. K.
  • Randomized Clinical Trials of Machine Learning Interventions in Health Care, A Systematic Review. (JAMA Network Open, 2022).
    • Plana, D., Shung, D. L., Grimshaw, A. A., Saraf, A., Sung, J. J. Y., & Kann, B. H.
  • Assessing the quality of nontraditional N95 filtering face-piece respirators available during the COVID-19 pandemic. (BMC Infectious Diseases, 2021).
    • Plana, D.*, Tian, E.*, Cramer, A. K.*, Yang, H.*, Carmack, M. M., Sinha, M. S., Bourgeois, F. T., Yu, S. H., Masse, P., Boyer, J., Kim, M., Mo, J., LeBoeuf, N. R., Li, J., & Sorger, P. K.
  • Analysis of SteraMist ionized hydrogen peroxide technology in the sterilization of N95 respirators and other PPE. (Scientific Reports, 2021).
    • Cramer, A. K.*, Plana, D.*, Yang, H.*, Carmack, M. M., Tian, E., Sinha, M. S., Krikorian, D., Turner, D., Mo, J., Li, J., Gupta, R., Manning, H., Bourgeois, F. T., Yu, S. H., Sorger, P. K., & LeBoeuf, N. R.
  • A Crisis-Responsive Framework for Medical Device Development Applied to the COVID-19 Pandemic. (Frontiers in Digital Health, 2021).
    • Antonini, M.-J.*, Plana, D.*, Srinivasan, S.*, Atta, L., Achanta, A., Yang, H., Cramer, A. K., Freake, J., Sinha, M. S., Yu, S. H., LeBoeuf, N. R., Linville-Engler, B., & Sorger, P. K.
  • De novo Powered Air-Purifying Respirator Design and Fabrication for Pandemic Response. (Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, 2021).
    • Kothakonda, A.*, Atta, L.*, Plana, D.*, Ward, F.*, Davis, C., Cramer, A., Moran, R., Freake, J., Tian, E., Mazor, O., Gorelik, P., Van, C., Hansen, C., Yang, H., Sinha, M. S., Li, J., Yu, S. H., LeBoeuf, N. R., & Sorger, P. K.
  • 3D Printed frames to enable reuse and improve the fit of N95 and KN95 respirators. (BMC Biomedical Engineering, 2021).
    • McAvoy, M.*, Bui, A.-T. N.*, Hansen, C.*, Plana, D.*, Said, J. T., Yu, Z., Yang, H., Freake, J., Van, C., Krikorian, D., Cramer, A., Smith, L., Jiang, L., Lee, K. J., Li, S. J., Beller, B., Huggins, K., Short, M. P., Yu, S. H., Mostaghimi, A., Sorger, P. K., & LeBoeuf, N. R.
  • A Proof of Concept for Biomarker-Guided Targeted Therapy against Ovarian Cancer Based on Patient-Derived Tumor Xenografts. (Cancer Research, 2020).
    • Palmer, A. C.*, Plana, D.*, Gao, H.*, Korn, J. M., Yang, G., Green, J., Zhang, X., Velazquez, R., McLaughlin, M. E., Ruddy, D. A., Kowal, C., Muszynski, J., Bullock, C., Rivera, S., Rakiec, D. P., Elliott, G., Fordjour, P., Meyer, R., Loo, A., … Sorger, P. K.
  • Comparing the Efficacy of Cancer Therapies between Subgroups in Basket Trials. (Cell Systems, 2020).
    • Palmer, A. C.*, Plana, D.*, & Sorger, P. K.
  • Regulatory and Safety Considerations in Deploying a Locally Fabricated, Reusable Face Shield in a Hospital Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic. (Med, 2020).
    • Mostaghimi, A.*, Antonini, M.-J.*, Plana, D.*, Anderson, P. D., Beller, B., Boyer, E. W., Fannin, A., Freake, J., Oakley, R., Sinha, M. S., Smith, L., Van, C., Yang, H., Sorger, P. K., LeBoeuf, N. R., & Yu, S. H.
  • Biomarker-driven strategy for MCL1 inhibition in T-cell lymphomas. (Blood, 2019).
    • Koch, R., Christie, A. L., Crombie, J. L., Palmer, A. C., Plana, D., Shigemori, K., Morrow, S. N., Van Scoyk, A., Wu, W., Brem, E. A., Secrist, J. P., Drew, L., Schuller, A. G., Cidado, J., Letai, A., & Weinstock, D. M.