Allergy Innovator

Christy Haynes '98 has won acclaim from the scientific community for her plan for watching allergic reactions on the cellular level.

BY | LAURA BILLINGS

When chemist ChrIsty Haynes ’98 first heard that the National Institutes of Health was directing a new grant for groundbreaking research toward young investigators, she wasn’t sure she had the kind of outside-the-box proposal they were looking for. The call for applicants made it clear that the nation’s largest medical research agency expected radically new, previously unexplored, “paradigm-disrupting” proposals that had the potential to revolutionize biomedical science.

“No pressure there, right?” laughs Haynes, an assistant chemistry professor at the University of Minnesota. She already had quite a lot on her plate—a general chemistry class with more than 300 undergraduates, a series of research projects exploring the toxicity of nanoparticles, not to mention a baby that she and husband Charles Burdick ’99 planned to welcome three weeks before the grant application was due. “I figured this probably wasn’t my year.”

Yet, when their son missed his deadline, Haynes found herself with three extra weeks for hers, “being too pregnant to go to the office, but having plenty of time to think.” Drawing on the work she began while earning her doctorate at Northwestern University researching nanoparticles, along with some previous explorations into the rise in worldwide rates of allergies and asthma, she began to wonder how researchers could watch what happens on a cellular level during an allergic reaction.

That’s when she came up with what she calls a “blue sky idea”—a plan to build the human immune system from the bottom up, linking one cell to the next on a chip the size of a credit card, to chart and measure how cells react and relate to each other when exposed to an allergen. Haynes turned in her application the same morning she checked into the maternity ward. Her son, Clark, was delivered safely soon after, and a check for $1.5 million, directed to her as one of only 31 winners of the 2008 NIH New Innovator award, arrived a few months later.

“It’s the kind of freedom you don’t very often get when you’re a young researcher,” says Haynes, who notes the grant has sentimental value, too. “I think this award will always feel special to me because it wouldn’t have gotten done if the baby hadn’t been late.”

Haynes’s interest in science was first nurtured by one of her high school teachers in Arizona. Soon afterwards, a Macalester recruiter introduced her to the idea of coming to Minnesota after graduation. Advanced placement credits allowed Haynes to finish her chemistry degree in just three years, even as financial pressures spurred her on to work 30 hours a week as a technical aid at 3M and another 10 hours a week as a chemistry teaching assistant. “I will always feel an incredible fondness for Macalester, in part because I left wanting more,” says Haynes, who met her husband—who works for National Wind, a community wind project developer in Minneapolis—her first week on campus.

One of the most important lessons Haynes took away from Macalester, she says, is “to accept what I’m ignorant about. I’m not afraid to approach something I don’t know anything about.” With no formal training in immunology, taking on a project to track allergic reactions was initially outside her comfort zone in chemistry, Haynes admits. “Just to write one sentence took an enormous amount of effort.” Yet, not being steeped in the conventional wisdom can be an advantage when it comes to seeing unconventional solutions. “I’ve been trained in a different way. I ask questions from a technological perspective—‘Why do we assume this? Have you measured this? How have you measured this?’ Whenever you develop new tools you’re going to ask new questions.”

Among the questions Haynes and her research team of graduate students hope to answer: How do cells “talk” to one another during an allergic reaction? Why are certain allergy treatments effective for some people but not for others? Do acute and chronic allergic reactions look different? And why do allergies appear to be a growing problem, with nearly 50 million sufferers in the United States alone? Malcolm Blumenthal, director of the allergies and asthma clinic at the University of Minnesota, is one expert who welcomes Haynes’s fresh eyes on the problem. “Until now, we’ve really just been treating allergy symptoms. But to understand a disease, you have to get down to a molecular level,” says Blumenthal. “She’s doing it, and it’s fascinating.”

Only a third of New Innovator grant winners are women, and even fewer are chemists—Haynes is one of just two tapped by the NIH. She’s hopeful that her groundbreaking work might inspire more women to go into the sciences, just as Macalester chemistry professor Rebecca Hoye inspired her. “She gave her students a lot of opportunities, and it was important for me to see that a woman with children could also be a chemistry professor,” says Haynes. “It kind of ingrained in me what was possible.”

Another Macalester lesson was that not knowing the answer to every question is part of the fun. “For me, chemistry is not the easiest thing,” says Haynes. “It doesn’t come naturally. I have to work really hard at chemistry. I think one of the reasons I chose it is because it challenges me—and will challenge me for the rest of my life.”