Endowed Chairs:
Team seeks cornerstones for cancer treatments
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
In a broad sense, academic research laboratories have a hierarchy similar to a fine restaurant.
While Kenneth D. Tew, holder of the John C. West Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at the Medical University of South Carolina, is officially the lab’s principal investigator, his main role is to establish the rules and functions of the “kitchen” and allow others to work within the broad parameters he sets.
He also brings in the investors, in terms of grants, and interacts with other university officials.
The day-to-day cooks in his kitchen are individuals doing their post-graduate work to establish themselves in the field and college students working on advanced degrees.
Among those doing that work on a recent Tuesday morning were post-grads Vladimir Beljanski and Jody Mack and graduate student Cameron McIlwain.
“We’re typically working on a number of projects at once,” McIlwain said. “For instance, one project we’re working on is trying to determine whether a compound that has shown promise in Russia is applicable here.
“If it is, it could someday be used in conjunction with standard chemotherapy, allowing you to use larger doses without causing more damage to the bone marrow.”
Mack and Beljanski, meanwhile, are working on an entirely different experiment, one that requires them to genetically engineer specialized rodent test subjects by knocking out the utility of certain genes in their body.
The genetic engineering occurs when the mouse is little more than a pre-embryonic group of cells in a Petri dish. The researchers add “knock-out cells” to arrest the development of a specific gene germane to their experiment.
“The mouse gene we’re studying is a 90 percent match for the corresponding human gene, and so we would expect that its response to our experiments will be similar to what would occur in a human being whose cancer is tied to a malfunctioning of that gene,” Mack said.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the perfect cancer mouse for their experiment. The babies exhibited a certain neurological tick that was completely unexpected.
“As a result, although neurology is not our area, we’re taking advantage of the situation to do a range of neurological experiments,” Mack said.
All of which is to say the MUSC cancer lab is a place where the vital, basic science that leads to big discoveries is practiced every day.
“This is a place where we’re always chasing after a story,” Beljanski said. “This is the place where you’re asking, ‘What does this compound do?’ and ‘Why does it do what it does?’ Toward that end we’re given a lot of latitude, a lot of freedom, within the context of a project.”
As a result, a lot of the work the lab team is engaged in is “a long way from translational science,” McIlwain said. “One of the main goals of the post-grads is to get their research published, but that in itself is an important step toward finding commercial uses for our work.
“If all the research we do and all the work we put into science one day results in a drug that helps somebody, that makes it all worth it.”
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.
|
E-Mail This Article
Printer-Friendly Version