In elementary school, Sean Luk loved donning an oversized lab coat and helping her mom pipette chemicals at Johns Hopkins University. A few years later, she started a science blog and became fascinated by immunoengineering, which is now her concentration as a biological engineering major at MIT.
Her grandparents’ battles with cancer made Luk, now a senior, realize how urgently patients need advancements in immunotherapy, which leverages a patient’s immune system to fight tumors or pathogens.
“The idea of creating something that is actually able to improve human health is what really drives me now. You want to fight that sense of helplessness when you see a loved one suffering through this disease, and it just further motivates me to be excellent at what I do,” Luk says.
A varsity athlete and entrepreneur as well as a researcher, Luk thrives when bringing people together for a common cause.
Working with immunotherapies
Luk was introduced to immunotherapies in high school after she listened to a seminar about using components of the immune system, such as antibodies and cytokines, to improve graft tolerance.
“The complexity of the immune system really fascinated me, and it is incredible that we can build antibodies in a very logical way to address disease,” Luk says.
She worked in several Johns Hopkins labs as a high school student in Maryland, and a professor there connected her to MIT Professor Dane Wittrup. Luk has worked in the Wittrup lab throughout her time at MIT. One of her main projects involves developing ultra-stable cyclic peptide drugs to help treat autoimmune diseases, which could potentially be taken orally instead of injected.
Luk has been a co-author on two published articles and has become increasingly interested in the intersection between computational and experimental protein design. Currently, she is working on engineering an interferon gamma construct that preferentially targets myeloid cells in the tumor microenvironment.
“We’re trying to target and reprogram the immunosuppressive myeloid cells surrounding the cancer cells, so that they can license T cells to attack cancer cells and kickstart the cancer immunity cycle,” she explains.
Communication for all
Through her work in high school with Best Buddies, an organization that aims to promote one-on-one friendships between students with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities, Luk became passionate about empowering people with special needs. At MIT, she started a project focusing on children with Down syndrome, with support from the Sandbox Innovation Fund.
“Through talking to a lot of parents and caretakers, the biggest issue that people with Down syndrome face is communication. And when you think about it, communication is crucial to everything that we do,” Luk says, “We want to communicate our thoughts. We want to be able to interact with our peers. And if people are unable to do that, it’s isolating, it’s frustrating.”
Her solution was to co-found EasyComm, an online game platform that helps children with Down syndrome work on verbal communication.
“We thought it would be a great way to improve their verbal communication skills while having fun and incentivize that kind of learning through gamification,” Luk says. She and her co-founder recently filed a provisional patent and plan to make the platform available to a wider audience.
A global perspective
Luk grew up in Hong Kong before moving to Maryland in the fifth grade. She’s always been athletic; in Hong Kong, she was a competitive jump roper. At just 9 years old, she won bronze in the Asian Jump Rope Championships among children 14 years old and younger. At 7 years old, she started playing soccer on her brother’s team, despite being the only girl. She says the sport was considered “manly” in Hong Kong, and girls were discouraged from joining, but her coaches and family were supportive.
Moving to the U.S. meant that her time in competitive jump roping was cut short, and Luk focused more on soccer. Her team in the U.S. felt far more intense than boys soccer in Hong Kong, but the Luk family was in it together, Luk says. She credits her success to the combination of her hard-working nature she learned from Hong Kong, and the innovation and experiences she was exposed to in the U.S.
“We had a really close bond within the family,” Luk says, “Figuring out taxes for my dad and our family, like driving and houses and all that stuff, it was totally new. But I think we really took it in stride, just adjusting as we went.”
Luk continued soccer throughout high school and eventually committed to play on the MIT team. She likes that the team allows players to prioritize academics while still being competitive. Last season, she was elected captain.
“It’s really a pleasure to be captain, and it’s challenging, but it’s also very rewarding when you see the team be cohesive. When you see the team out there winning games through grit,” Luk says.
During her first year at MIT, Luk got back in touch with her old soccer coach from Hong Kong, who then worked on the national team. After sending over some tape, she was offered a spot on the U-20 national team, and played in the U20 Asian Football Championship Qualifiers.
“It was so, so cool to be able to represent Hong Kong because I played soccer all my life but it just carries a different weight to it when you’re wearing your country’s jersey,” Luk says.
Besides her cross-cultural background, Luk is also proud of her international experiences playing soccer, staying with host families and doing lab work in Copenhagen, Denmark; Stuttgart, Germany; and Ancona, Italy. She speaks English, Cantonese, and Mandarin fluently.
“Aside from the textbook academic knowledge, I feel like a global perspective is so important when you’re trying to collaborate with other people from different walks of life,” Luk says, “When you’re just thinking about science or the impact that you can have in general, it’s important to realize you don’t have all the answers and to learn from the world outside your little bubble.”