Case Summary:

A bioinformatics scientist from Turkey came to us for her NIW (National Interest Waiver) application. Her proposed endeavor was to work on her research on large-scale genetics and bimolecular datasets to discover disease-driver mechanisms and identify therapeutic targets. This would have helped to develop personalized, cost-effective diagnostics and therapies for diseases such as cancer, including myeloma. Among other applications, her research is relevant to treating myeloma, reducing the cost of healthcare, and enhancing the quality of diagnostics. Thus her research is clearly of great importance because it improves the global effort to effectively diagnose and treat diseases, especially myeloma.

Our client has greatly advanced the fight against myeloma through her research on protein functionality, genomes and phenotypes, and protein discovery, as well as her ongoing research into therapeutic outcomes in patients with multiple myeloma. She has thus asserted herself as a globally essential researcher who has invaluably improved disease diagnostics and therapeutics, including myeloma. This is why her work has been appreciated by several other scholars of which 4 scholars gave her letters of recommendation. One of these recommendations read:

“[The client] is conducting research of truly global importance, as her work addresses both of these priorities. Specifically, she is training algorithms to assess and differentiate data on myeloma in order to significantly increase the accuracy of diagnosis. Furthermore, she is also training algorithms to analyze genetic data in order to identify individualized therapeutic targets and deliver therapeutic treatments at reduced cost and greater efficacy.”

At the same time, her proposed endeavor also has broad implications for the United States, since the US healthcare system currently suffers from many issues, including increasingly prohibitive pricing and imprecise diagnostics. Our client is addressing both of these issues in her research on advancing therapeutics and diagnostics for diverse conditions, including cancer.

Thus, due to its evident national importance, her research has also been supported with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

At the same time, she has completed at least 16 reviews to date and her research has resulted in 5 peer-reviewed journal articles (2 of them first-authored) and 2 conference papers which have been cited a total of 139 times according to Google Scholar.

Hence, her 9 years of work in the field had helped her build a formidable CV which was appreciated by the adjudicating bench as well who granted her the approval without an RFE. We are glad to have been of help to her in this process.