The 2024 recipients of the Pew Award, from left to proper: Vijay Mohan Ok Namboodiri, PhD; Justin Eyquem, PhD; and Jovanka Gencel-Augusto, PhD. Footage via Susan Merrell
3 UC San Francisco scientists have won 2024 Pew awards to fund their analysis in neuroscience and most cancers.
They come with a cognitive scientist, Vijay Mohan Ok Namboodiri, PhD, who’s difficult the reigning idea of studying; Justin Eyquem, PhD, a bioengineer who goals to construct cancer-fighting mobile treatments from inside of an individual’s frame; and Jovanka Gencel-Augusto, PhD, a postdoctoral student from Peru who’s learning most cancers genetics.
What truly occurs in studying?
Namboodiri, a Pew Pupil within the Biomedical Sciences, research the position that dopamine performs in associative studying, the method that connects purpose with impact.
In different phrases, if you happen to devour at a cafe and don’t really feel neatly later on, how does your mind translate that into, “Don’t devour there once more”?
The present consensus is that animals incessantly are expecting what’s going to occur in a given state of affairs, and when they’re flawed, a dose of dopamine of their brains marks the mistake and is helping the animal refine its working out.
However the procedure would possibly if truth be told paintings in opposite. Namboodiri has exposed proof that noteworthy studies, somewhat than misguided predictions, cause the dopamine hits, inflicting the animal to suppose again on what may have brought about them.
Namboodiri will use the four-year fellowship to map the positioning and task of every particular person neuron concerned on this procedure in mice. Working out precisely what is occurring in those learning-and-reward methods may level methods to resetting them after they grow to be impaired in issues akin to dependancy and PTSD.
“With the ability to are expecting an result is without doubt one of the maximum elementary sides of animal existence,” mentioned Namboodiri. “My hope is this paintings brings us a brand new working out about how animal brains be informed.”
Vijay Mohan Ok Namboodiri, PhD, research organic algorithms and neuronal community mechanisms underlying associative studying, reminiscence and decision-making, at his lab at the us Joan and Sanford Weill Neurosciences Development on the Challenge Bay campus.
A brand new strategy to engineer cells within the frame
Eyquem, a Pew-Stewart Pupil for Most cancers Analysis, is a bioengineer who has been refining an advanced most cancers remedy referred to as CAR-T remedy, wherein a affected person’s personal immune cells are re-engineered to assault the tumor.
Whilst those remedies will also be extremely a hit, dwelling medication also are tough to make and prohibitively dear.
The method comes to setting apart immune cells from sufferers’ blood and reprogramming them with gene enhancing, which will have to be completed in a sterile facility. The cells are most effective put again in after sufferers have passed through chemotherapy to suppress their immune methods.
Eyquem desires to skip over those steps with applied sciences that may edit immune cells immediately inside of an individual’s frame.
This innovation may do away with pricey steps within the manufacturing of the cells and spare sufferers from desiring chemotherapy. Eyquem hopes this may increasingly make CAR-T mobile remedy dramatically less expensive, quicker and extra obtainable.
Eyquem is a part of a small cohort of Pew-Stewart students who will meet all through the four-year fellowship to proportion their paintings and expectantly encourage new concepts.
“It’s going to introduce me to a group of very inventive thinkers and folks which might be at the leading edge of this box,” he mentioned. “That is the type of community that truly is helping transfer those discoveries from the lab into the health center.”
At their Parnassus Heights lab, Chang Liu (left), Justin Eyquem, PhD (middle), and Joseph Muldoon, PhD (proper), are creating a gene enhancing platform to improve CAR-T and NK mobile purposes in hematological and cast tumors to combat most cancers and different illnesses.
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 is helping save you tumors and is steadily altered in head and neck cancers. She hopes to pinpoint precisely how p53 helps to keep tumors at bay and in finding tactics to reactivate it when it will get compromised.
Rising up within the small the town of Piura, Peru, Gencel-Augusto evolved a keenness for her box when her maternal aunt used to be recognized with breast most cancers on the age of 36. Gencel-Augusto moved to the capital town of Lima to get a point in biology, and realized about genetic trying out for breast most cancers whilst doing an internship with a neighborhood most cancers institute that used to be partnered with the Mayo Hospital.
Her aunt examined sure for BRCA1, a gene that will increase chance for breast and ovarian most cancers and is steadily handled in the USA with a preventative mastectomy. Her aunt’s docs by no means beneficial it, on the other hand, and her most cancers got here again 5 years later. For Gancel-Augusto, the enjoy highlighted how the loss 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 thankful 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 occupation,” she mentioned. “I need to give a contribution to making improvements to most cancers analysis and the placement for most cancers sufferers again house.”
Jovanka Gencel-Augusto, PhD, is serious about discovering targetable vulnerabilities in most cancers cells to regard them extra successfully. She works within the labs of Jennifer Grandis, MD, and Daniel Johnson, PhD at the us Helen Diller Circle of relatives Complete Most cancers Analysis Development within the Challenge Bay campus.
