Nicole Paulk was flipping through her phone in bed early one morning in June when an email from a colleague woke her up. It was an article: two patients in an Audentes gene therapy trial died and the study was stopped.
Paulk, who runs a gene therapy lab at the University of California, San Francisco, planned to pass the day on to the discussion at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, which took place that week. Instead, she skipped the conference, canceled every work call on her calendar, and started calling colleagues across academia and industry and trying to figure out what happened and why. All the while, a single name hangs in the back of her head.
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