Post by Harvard Medical School

For graduating MD-PhD student Leonard Nettey, there are many ways to make a difference. After settling into his medical studies at HMS and his doctoral research in pediatric inflammatory bowel disease, he took the offer from Ashley Kyalwazi MD MPP to help lead a national nonprofit that would empower more Black students to pursue careers in health care and biomedical science. In 2023, their nonprofit, The MV3 Foundation, won the Harvard Business School New Venture Competition, and its first cohort of scholars completed the program. Today, MV3 has helped over 175 undergraduates nationwide by giving them a community of peers and free academic and professional mentorship. He is also making a difference through his research. Nettey joined the Lab of Alex Shalek, an HST faculty member based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, jumping into a research project on T cells in pediatric IBD. The project aimed to take some of the guesswork out of matching patients with treatments. Lab members examined the molecular profiles of newly diagnosed pediatric patients with IBD to try to predict whether they would respond to a particular treatment. The study found that features of certain T cells were associated with a lack of response to that treatment — an important finding that indicated patients with those T-cell features would fare better with a different therapy. For his part, Nettey handled the primary data analysis and project management of the multicenter study. He is co-first author on the resulting paper, which is currently in preprint. The experience hit a sweet spot for him: intellectually stimulating research that had the potential to directly help patients in the near future. The importance of the research hit home when, after completing his PhD in 2024, Nettey met an adult patient during an HMS clinical rotation who had IBD and had failed treatment. “Even with all the knowledge I had amassed through my PhD — how IBD works, the immunology of it, the drugs for it — we still didn’t have an answer for this individual in front of me,” he said. “It’s very humbling.” His next step is an internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital.