Turning Hardship into Hard Work

By: Markie Heideman, Content Marketing Manager

In the small west Michigan village of Shelby, life is simple. It’s known as the place where up north begins and where the fine fruit grows. But for Katelyn Brown, growing up in Shelby was anything but simple. For much of her teenage years, Katelyn dealt with a series of health issues – keeping her away from the quiet and quaint nature of the town, and leaving her hospitalized a number of times an hour south.

“In 2016, when I was fifteen, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease,” Brown explained. 

Crohn’s disease is a type of inflammatory bowel disease in the digestive tract. It can be painful and debilitating and impacts millions of Americans each year. Even though millions suffer from it, treatment is not always effective, and strong drug reactions can occur. For Brown, unfortunately, that was the case. “Once they started treatment, a combination of the drug reactions and the disease set me into an immune reaction that is fatal in 30% of cases.” 

Brown’s skin began to blister and burn, and she was eventually diagnosed with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a reaction that typically involves the skin and the mucous membranes.

For months and years after, Brown experienced a suite of autoimmune diseases – at one point going into sepsis and lung failure. 

When she questioned why this was happening and why she was experiencing such adverse reactions to treatment, she was often told there was simply not enough research to know. 

That’s when she decided, when she recovered, she would take matters into her own hands and pursue a career in researching drug reactions to work toward better health outcomes for others. 

Letting the Past Fuel Her Future

Fast forward to today, Brown is a second-year Medicinal Chemistry PhD candidate at the College of Pharmacy and recently accepted to the Graduate Research Fellowship Program, or GRFP, through the National Science Foundation (NSF), after an extremely competitive application process.  

The program will fund Brown’s PhD tuition and provide her with a research stipend for the final three years of her program. For her, this support means everything. 

“It means a lot that I don’t have to find any more funding for my PhD, but mostly this is a really big acknowledgment that I can do this and that I’m doing the right things. It shows that not only my friends and family think I can do this, but so does the NSF.”

This fellowship program comes after years of hard work and dedication to pharmaceutical research. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology from Ferris State University, where she led two projects on genetically modifying soil bacteria to make them produce anti-cancer drugs, assisted on two other projects, presented eight posters, and was published seven times in publications like “Engineering BioBricks for Deoxysugar Biosynthesis and Generation of New Tetracenomycins”.

Now, in the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy’s Medicinal Chemistry PhD program, Katelyn works in the Alison Narayan Lab, and focuses her research on a toxin produced by species of cyanobacteria. These bacteria are commonly found in freshwater environments and the toxin can be the reason people can get sick when consuming shellfish if they’re not harvested in the right season. 

Committed to seeking answers on how natural elements can be used for medicinal purposes, Brown is specifically researching how this toxin is produced so that it can be modified to create medical treatments. Although in the early stages of this research, Brown has recently made breakthroughs in discovering chemistry performed by enzymes in the cyanobacteria that produce the toxin.

Future Focused 

Besides solving how this toxin is created and potentially helping toward the development of new medication, Brown’s long-term goal is to stay in academia for pharmacy. 

“I had the most incredible mentors as a young scientist, and I want to give back. I hope to teach at a primarily undergraduate institution and run a research lab and help get my students’ get their feet wet with research.”

She is confident that the College’s program is successfully setting her up to meet those goals.

“I’m extremely grateful to be a part of the Medicinal Chemistry program at the College of Pharmacy. It’s small and close-knit, and people have really supported me in this program. The administration and support staff don’t make you feel like a number.”

And a number Brown surely isn’t. She’s a gleaming example of making good out of a tough situation, and the indicator of a bright future in pharmacy and the motivation to make an impact in patients’ lives.