Chronic Disease and Corgis: The Varied Interests of Wistar’s Dr. Samantha Soldan

Infectious disease specialist & senior scientist in Wistar’s Lieberman lab, Dr. Soldan studies the connection between M.S. and Epstein Barr Virus. She is most intrigued with how the body responds to disease—why sleeping viruses reactivate, how age contributes to disease and the origins of disease and its effects on culture and humanity.

When did science become a passion that you wanted to follow?

I would like to say it was a very well-thought-out strategic plan that got me to the career and the position I’m in now, but it really wasn’t. I had a balanced education and liked natural history & animals, so I was set on becoming a veterinarian as a child. I didn’t have a particularly pronounced scientific aptitude, so I was not solely on a science track.

Tell us about growing up.

As a kid, I moved a lot because my father was an architect. I was born in New York, moved to Denver, then LA and then London. I graduated from high school in London, then my parents moved back to LA.

Where did you go to college?

I went to Mount Holyoke, an all-women’s college. Again, I intended to become a veterinarian, but my father actually talked me out of it. He said, “You think it’s going to be all kittens and puppies, but really, you’re going to be in a field with your hand up the back end of a cow and you are not suited to it.” Upon reflection, I should have ignored this advice.

I did an anthropology minor and that jump-started my interest in infectious diseases because I focused on how infections, plagues, and other diseases influenced culture and evolution — all these ways that our lives have been impacted by biology behind the scenes.

After I graduated, I moved to DC for no other big reason than that’s where my friends were going because they all wanted to be lawyers and lobbyists. I stumbled into an entry level technician position at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), not really appreciating the magnitude or significance of where I was.

What was your first job?

My first job was at Kentucky Fried Chicken.  My first significant job out of college was at the NIH where I stayed for graduate school with Dr. Steven Jacobson, with whom we still collaborate today. He was a big influence on my graduate education and career. After leaving Mount Holyoke, I interviewed at several labs at NIH focused on malaria research and went to interview with Steve Jacobson’s lab and the neuro-immunology branch thinking that I was probably not interested in joining his lab. He was working on multiple sclerosis (MS), which was something I did not think had anything to do with infectious disease— but, at the same time, I had somebody very close to me who had been diagnosed with MS, so I interviewed there and unexpectedly learned about the suspected connections between infectious agents and the etiology of MS. I chose to join his lab, which had a major impact on my trajectory.

In addition to work exploring the role of viruses as causative agents in MS, Steve was working on human T-lymphotropic virus (HTLV-1), which is a retrovirus that causes adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma (ATL), and a chronic progressive neurologic condition called tropical spastic paraparesis (HAM/TSP). So that’s where I started my research career in earnest. And then decided I wanted to go to grad school and was able to stay working at Steve’s lab while doing coursework at George Washington University, where I got my Ph.D.

Tell me about Steven Jacobson.

Steve is well-known for his research in viruses in MS and in HAM TSP, the latter of which is relatively unknown in the US because it’s a virus that’s endemic in southern Japan, parts of Africa, and the Caribbean.

HTVL-1 — the virus that causes HAM TSP — is similar to EBV in that it’s typically a latent, symptomless virus in the people it infects. With EBV, 98% of us have it and1.5% of cancers are caused by EBV, but for most people, it is considered a lifelong, benign infection. Similarly, HTLV-1 causes HAM TSP in about 5% of those infected and about 2% develop adult T-cell leukemia. But most people who have this virus go through life totally fine and will die from some other cause. The enigmatic role of ubiquitous viruses in disease in a subset of those infected was a focus of my graduate school thesis and carries through to our work in the Lieberman Lab, trying to understand the role of EBV in cancer and autoimmunity, again, in a subset of those infected with the virus.

Why did you choose the Lieberman lab?

I was eager to be part of a larger group and there was nascent work on the Epstein-Barr Nuclear Antigen-1(EBNA1) inhibitor led by Paul and Troy Messick. EBNA1 is expressed in all EBV-related cancers and necessary for those cancer to grow. It was appealing to be part of something that could and did result in a clinical trial.

The potential association between EBV and MS was still incredibly interesting to me when I joined the Lieberman lab. Support for the link between in EBV and MS had been mounting and, in 2022, a large epidemiological study focused on over 10 million members of the US military convinced most in the MS field to acknowledge EBV as a major causative factor—perhaps even prerequisite in MS. I have remained in regular contact with Steve and we had been thinking of different ways to collaborate on the question of EBV in MS.  This was a somewhat difficult proposition for me without regular access to clinical  samples.

Steve and I came up with the idea of focusing some initial studies on spontaneous lymphoblastoid cell lines in lieu of primary clinical samples. If you put Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells (PBMCs) from MS patients and culture the cells, you are more likely to get spontaneously transformed lines than with PBMCs from healthy controls. These spontaneous lymphoblastoid cell lines are B cell lines that are transformed by the patient’s own EBV, which distinguishes them from the lymphoblastoid lines that we generate regularly with laboratory strain EBV in the Lieberman lab and at other labs at The Wistar. So, Steve’s lab generated spontaneous lymphoblastoid cell lines for the Lieberman lab from MS patients and controls, which allow us to study the effects of EBV infection in B cells of MS patients.

Building on that progress, the Lieberman lab has opened up collaborations with researchers at Penn and Jefferson to connect our findings with what’s happening in patients. We want more insight, but we’re increasingly confident that EBV is a major etiologic factor. We still don’t know how EBV leads to a heterogenous neurologic disease, like MS, in a very small percentage of those infected. Does it continue to drive disease relapses and disease progression? Does it have to be in the brain? Or is something in the periphery triggering events in the brain? What about the host’s background (age, sex, genetics) influences how the immune system interacts with EBV and predisposes an individual to develop MS? We’re focused on all these questions.

Your husband is also a scientist. How did you meet Jonathan?

I met him in DC, and he was working for an environmental lobbying firm. His interest is in ecology and biomechanics. Now, he’s chair of the biology department at St Joseph’s University.

Are your sons are going to be scientists?

I think my younger son will definitely become a scientist, but my older son will be a finance bro. Somebody has to support the rest of us!

Why do you think your youngest will be a scientist?

He taught me about Dyson spheres the other day. It’s a sci-fi concept that’s hypothetically feasible, where you build an energy-capturing sphere around a star that can power an advanced civilization sustainably. So he’s into that, but the older one, not as much. My eldest wants to be an engineer, but then possibly go to business. They’re very different.

Do you have a hobby?

We’re big dog people. When we moved to Philly, my husband and I had trouble agreeing on what kind of dog we wanted. He wanted a very chill dog, and I grew up with Dalmatians, so I wanted a dog that was more high-energy and an active buddy. I tricked him a bit with the Corgi we got. Corgis look very chill because they’re somewhat stout, but they’re very much not chill. They were bred to herd cattle, so they’re low enough and can do this type of roll to avoid the angle of the kick. They’re tough little dogs.

The breeder sent info on sheep herding and mentioned, “Oh, it may be fun to just take your corgi Xena for an instinct test.” On a lark, I took her, and she was amazing and passed. Then I ended up taking Xena to herding lessons in New Jersey. Xena was our first Corgi and we spent a lot of time competing. Now we have a second corgi named Thorin who also goes to herding lessons—he’s not as talented, but we both enjoy it, nonetheless. Turns out I do enjoy standing in a field with livestock.

What drives you and keeps you most excited and passionate about the science that you do?

I think an ongoing curiosity and a hope that, someday, something that you do ends up leading to a treatment or a preventive measure.

Any good books you would like to recommend?

A good book that Dr. Italo Tempera recently shared with me is Trust by Hernan Diaz. It’s about a wealthy couple during the 1920s and the stock market crash, and it’s written from four different, unreliable perspectives on what was really happening at the time — so the reader has to work to piece together the truth, which was very interesting.