Three UC San Francisco scientists have obtained 2024 Pew awards to fund their analysis in neuroscience and most cancers.
They embrace a cognitive scientist, Vijay Mohan Okay Namboodiri, PhD, who’s difficult the reigning concept of studying; Justin Eyquem, PhD, a bioengineer who goals to construct cancer-fighting cell therapies from inside an individual’s physique; and Jovanka Gencel-Augusto, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar from Peru who’s finding out most cancers genetics.
What actually occurs in studying?
Namboodiri, a Pew Scholar within the Biomedical Sciences, research the function that dopamine performs in associative studying, the method that connects trigger with impact.
In different phrases, in the event you eat at a restaurant and don’t really feel properly afterward, how does your mind translate that into, “Don’t eat there once more”?
The present consensus is that animals constantly predict what’s going to occur in a given scenario, and when they’re improper, a dose of dopamine of their brains marks the error and helps the animal refine its understanding.
However the course of may very well work in reverse. Namboodiri has uncovered proof that noteworthy experiences, reasonably than misguided predictions, set off the dopamine hits, inflicting the animal to suppose again on what may need precipitated them.
Namboodiri will use the four-year fellowship to map the situation and exercise of every particular person neuron concerned on this course of in mice. Understanding precisely what is going on in these learning-and-reward techniques may level the best way to resetting them once they grow to be impaired in problems corresponding to dependancy and PTSD.
“With the ability to predict an end result is without doubt one of the most basic features of animal life,” mentioned Namboodiri. “My hope is that this work brings us a brand new understanding about how animal brains study.”
A brand new option to engineer cells within the physique
Eyquem, a Pew-Stewart Scholar for Most cancers Analysis, is a bioengineer who has been refining a classy most cancers therapy referred to as CAR-T remedy, by which a affected person’s personal immune cells are re-engineered to assault the tumor.
Whereas these remedies will be extremely profitable, residing medication are additionally tough to make and prohibitively costly.
The method includes isolating immune cells from sufferers’ blood and reprogramming them with gene enhancing, which should be accomplished in a sterile facility. The cells are solely put again in after sufferers have undergone chemotherapy to suppress their immune techniques.
Eyquem desires to skip over these steps with applied sciences that may edit immune cells immediately inside an individual’s physique.
This innovation may eradicate pricey steps within the manufacturing of the cells and spare sufferers from needing chemotherapy. Eyquem hopes this may make CAR-T cell remedy dramatically cheaper, sooner and extra accessible.
Eyquem is a part of a small cohort of Pew-Stewart students who will meet all through the four-year fellowship to share their work and hopefully encourage new concepts.
“It’s going to introduce me to a group of very artistic thinkers and other people which might be on the forefront of this area,” he mentioned. “That is the sort of community that actually helps transfer these discoveries from the lab into the clinic.”
A tumor suppressing gene that malfunctions
Gencel-Augusto, a Pew Latin American Fellow within the Biomedical Sciences, works within the labs of Jennifer Grandis, MD, and Daniel Johnson, PhD, the place she is bringing her experience in genetics and most cancers biology to check p53, a gene that helps stop tumors and is commonly altered in head and neck cancers. She hopes to pinpoint precisely how p53 retains tumors at bay and discover methods to reactivate it when it will get compromised.
Rising up within the small city of Piura, Peru, Gencel-Augusto developed a ardour for her area when her maternal aunt was recognized with breast most cancers on the age of 36. Gencel-Augusto moved to the capital metropolis of Lima to get a level in biology, and realized about genetic testing for breast most cancers whereas doing an internship with a neighborhood most cancers institute that was partnered with the Mayo Clinic.
Her aunt examined constructive for BRCA1, a gene that will increase threat for breast and ovarian most cancers and is commonly handled in the USA with a preventative mastectomy. Her aunt’s medical doctors by no means really helpful it, nonetheless, and her most cancers got here again 5 years later. For Gancel-Augusto, the expertise highlighted how the dearth of sources and information in Peru impacts folks’s well being.
Gencel-Augusto moved to the U.S. for her PhD, and she or he is grateful to have landed a postdoctoral place at UCSF. Her dream, she mentioned, is to have her personal lab the place she trains Latin American scientists in most cancers analysis.
“That’s the entire motivation for my profession,” she mentioned. “I wish to contribute to bettering most cancers analysis and the scenario for most cancers sufferers again residence.”
