Imagine your doctor could precisely predict your personal risk of disease, diagnose the cause of illness with pinpoint accuracy when it did occur, and develop an effective treatment plan with low side effects the first time, rather than through trial and error. That's the promise of personalized medicine. And it would be a revolution in healthcare. 

At the heart of this vision is the notion that our genetic differences have a big impact on how each of us responds to disease and treatment. To realize a future of personalized medicine then, we need to understand and investigate just how genetic variations, including mutations, contribute to illness and respond to doctors' attempts to address it. But how can scientists do that efficiently with a human genome that spans about three billion base pairs of DNA across tens of thousands of genes? 

That's where the work of PhD student Dawn Chen comes in. A student in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and the Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology Program, Chen was named a recipient of the 2025 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award for Outstanding Achievement and Exceptional Research in the Biological Sciences, presented by Seattle's Fred Hutch Cancer Center. 

With her colleagues in the lab of Harvard professor Fei Chen, Dawn Chen is developing an innovative gene-editing tool known as helicase-assisted continuous editing, or HACE. A breakthrough in genetic engineering, supported in part by funds from the National Institutes of Health, HACE makes edits to specific genes, allowing researchers to investigate how genetic variations contribute to disease. The technique could lead to the identification of specific mutations that influence the effectiveness of drugs and therapies for illnesses like cancer.