She’s the daughter of Filipino immigrants, of a Las Vegas nephrologist who has also helped patients in severely underserved areas of the United States manage acute and chronic kidney problems. While immensely proud of her physician-father’s accomplishments, Claire Victoria Celada Ong, now a member of the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV Class of ‘26, had no intention of entering the medical profession.
“My father would often come home after seeing 50 patients, bone-tired and yet preparing for a night call,” says Ong, whose mother is a medical technologist. “Seeing the heavy responsibility he bore was enough to deter me from the medical field.”
But then, as a teen, she and her two younger brothers saw their beloved aunt fighting cancer.
“It was Stage 4 colon cancer, a dire prognosis, and I watched my aunt’s face crumble. But her oncologist, Dr. Smith, refused to admit defeat. With his aggressive treatment plan, I witnessed my aunt slowly regain her usual strength. He took what felt to her like a death sentence and gave her the will to fight. And while my aunt eventually did pass away from her cancer, Dr. Smith was able to extend her life by eight years, years in which she watched her only daughter enter kindergarten. She set sail on a month-long cruise with her husband. She spent long nights watching teleseryes (Filipino TV soap operas) with my grandmother. I was inspired by Dr. Smith’s determination and willpower. I knew I wanted to be a physician who gives hope to the hopeless.”
Today, Ong, blessed with a keen intellect, one fueled by a sense of purpose borne out of love – she was valedictorian of her Advanced Technologies Academy class in the Clark County School District and graduated Cum Laude from Yale University – is well on her way to becoming an oncologist.
At the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine, the young woman who volunteered at the HAVEN Free Medical Clinic at Yale and was a reporter for the university newspaper, has already distinguished herself, becoming the Medical Student Research State Champion for her poster presentation at the American College of Physicians 2023 Nevada Chapter Annual Scientific Meeting in October. A month earlier, she took first place for her oral presentation at the Medical Research Society’s Fourth Annual Medical Student Research Symposium.
Her interest in CAR-T cells, an emerging cancer treatment that essentially reprograms your immune system to fight the cancer in your body, has only grown stronger after a summer 2023 National Institutes of Health (NIH) internship – one spent in the pediatric oncology branch of the Kaplan Lab at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland.
“This past summer working with Dr. Rosie Kaplan was inspiring. She would spend her mornings seeing patients and her afternoons coming into the lab and talking to each of us about our projects. At every lab meeting, she would always tell us that it doesn’t matter if your finding only saves one person, that’s still one person whose life is going to be so much longer because of the work we do every day. It was inspiring to hear her passion and enthusiasm. I realized that I wanted to do research to help push the medical field forward – I wanted to improve lives one at a time through bettering the treatment options they would have.”
At the Kaplan Lab, she worked with a mentor to develop an experiment that analyzed the interaction between CXCR3+ monocytes and CAR-T cells. “Monocytes,” she explains, “are a type of white blood cell that makes up your body’s immune system and CAR-T cells are special white blood cells that are actually cells from your own body that a doctor will extract via apheresis, genetically engineered to express this receptor known as a CAR, and then replace back into the body via blood transfusion. The goal is that this genetically engineered CAR-T cell will now be more effective at finding and killing cancer cells.”
Ong’s research experience had a profound effect on her.
“The joy I get from research comes in two parts. For one, it’s the little joys of having a supportive team in the lab that encourages you when you feel run down, brainstorms with you when you reach an impasse in the research process and celebrates sincerely with you when you get successful results. And on the other side, it’s the delayed gratification of toiling away at a research project, trying over and over again to get an experiment to work, suffering multiple failures, and then finally seeing an experiment work. It’s incredibly satisfying when that happens. Being able to present my results at a lab meeting and hearing my principal investigator tell me that the work we do could save patients’ lives, it made me love research and want to incorporate it into my future plans.”
Her time at NIH also made a significant difference in what she sees as her future and how she views the practice of medicine.
“Initially, my goal was to become a physician in a medically underserved area, open my own practice with translators and social workers employed in the same building to improve healthcare access, and work part time in a free clinic to provide healthcare to those who are uninsured. My experience at the NIH this summer, however, has changed my goal. Now I would like to become a physician at an academic institution. I want to see patients and help lead clinical trials to make novel therapeutics more accessible to patients. For a place like Nevada, I hope to return to the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine as an attending physician and help develop a research branch as part of the hospital system. And I would like to help bring new research innovations and therapeutics to the city to make them accessible for our residents. I think a huge issue with healthcare, in addition to basic care accessibility, is that new therapies and treatments are often not accessible to patients unless they live near a medical school that has NIH-funded research.”
