Costales’ studies focus on developing tools and approaches to creating potential oral medications to target RNA, a new strategy for addressing previously ‘undruggable,’ incurable diseases.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do this without this institution, without this infrastructure, without all of these great scientists who are here, without all of the collaborations. It’s this organism working to make life easier for people with currently untreatable diseases.”
Fellowship
The American Chemical Society’s Division of Medicinal Chemistry awarded Matthew Costales one of its prestigious Medicinal Chemistry Predoctoral Fellowships.
Inspiration
“When my sister was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and I felt completely helpless as she told me the news. When something like this happens, you look back and say, this is my sister and she is suffering and I cannot do anything. If 20 years from now, what I’m working on actually becomes a therapy, maybe then I will no longer feel helpless. Maybe other people in this position won’t have to feel helpless.”
Matthew Costales, Ph.D.
I was born in Toronto, Canada, and raised in North Olmsted, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. My parents wanted me to become a doctor. I went to the University of Maryland as a chemistry major, but when I started doing undergraduate research, my perspective really changed. No disrespect to doctors, but if you look from a bird’s-eye view, the only way to completely solve diseases – to cure them — is to attack the disease itself.
So senior year I called my parents and said, “ I don’t want to be a doctor.” I took a break from school to experience more research working at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Immunobiology Branch in the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. After two years of research into foodborne disease there, I felt ready to apply to graduate school. I came up with a mission statement for myself: We need to apply chemistry to solve biological problems in many incurable diseases.
Looking at graduate schools I did what everyone does and looked at U.S. News and World Report. People want to be at a reputable place, but you can’t pick a grad school based just on rank. You have to look at the people who work at an institution. I wanted to do completely new things and put my stamp on a field where others have said “you can’t do that.” When I interviewed in Jupiter and I visited different labs, I came across Disney lab. Chemistry Professor Matt Disney is honestly the most passionate person about research that I’ve met. A lot of people think that diseases are caused by proteins. Accessing the RNA machinery behind them, learning what chemical space we can use to target these diseases, that can open up new ways to solve incurable diseases. That was his elevator pitch to me. At that moment, I was in.
When my sister was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and I felt completely helpless as she told me the news. When something like this happens, you look back and say, this is my sister and she is suffering and I cannot do anything. If 20 years from now, what I’m working on actually becomes a therapy, maybe then I will no longer feel helpless. Maybe other people in this position won’t have to feel helpless.
I wouldn’t have been able to do this without this institution, without this infrastructure, without all of these great scientists who are here, without all of the collaborations. It’s this organism working to make life easier for people with currently untreatable diseases.
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