As a kid, Nico Poux showed up for every doctor’s appointment with his backpack fully stocked.

“I had a Zuca backpack, like a mini-stand-up suitcase, that I would fill up with stuff, even for checkups,” Poux said recently. He needed a big stash of books, games and activities to keep himself busy if his doctors delivered bad news. “Any checkup could turn into a several-month stay in the hospital.”

Diagnosed with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 2005, when he was 6, Poux spent the next seven years undergoing treatment for the blood-cell cancer. He estimates he spent 18 months hospitalized, ultimately needing many rounds of chemotherapy, as well as a bone marrow transplant at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford.

Today, Poux, 21, is healthy. In June, he earned a bachelor’s degree in molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Stanford, and after conducting research for the last five years in the lab of Stanford stem cell pioneer Irving Weissman, MD, he’s about to start Harvard’s MD-PhD program, the next step in his plan to become a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, his classes will be online this fall. He’s planning to stay in California for the time being and move to Boston in January.

Poux hopes to help young cancer patients who have been ill so long they aren’t quite sure what regular life looks like anymore. For a long stretch of his childhood, he needed people around him to help nurture his hope that eventually he would live a life without illness. 

“As a kid, you just want to be normal again, when you feel so different,” Poux said. “I found it helpful whenever people could remind me that there does exist a life outside of this.” 

A scientific friendship

One of the people who helped shape Poux’s view of the possibilities beyond hospital walls was Jonathan Tsai, MD, PhD. They met in the fall of 2011, when Poux was 12. Several months earlier, Poux had suffered a relapse in which malignant cells had appeared in his spinal cord, and he had undergone a stem cell transplant. Tsai was a first-year medical student enrolled in an elective class in which students are paired with Packard Children’s patients who have long-term illnesses.

Before they met, Tsai was concerned there might be a language barrier. He knew that Poux had lived in Paris until he was 11, and that Poux had received much of his cancer treatment in France before his family moved to the Bay Area in 2010. Tsai had spent three years living in Brussels and spoke some French, but he wasn’t fluent. Still, he hoped he could keep Poux company while the latter received infusions of intravenous immunoglobin, an immune therapy he needed after his stem cell transplant.