Grant: Project Grant

All of our body's cells have systems, collectively called "cytoprotective factors", that protect the cell's components from damage. These factors help maintain cell health, and thus help prevent many diseases, such as neurodegenerative disease (e.g. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc). However, when erroneously activated, cytoprotective factors also allow cancer cells to thrive and to resist treatment with chemotherapies. In cancer, disrupting hyperactive cytoprotective systems is therefore a potential therapeutic approach. Our research focuses on the 'Mediator', a molecular machine that is required to read and transcribe genetic information. Mediator is present in all organisms from yeast cells to humans. This means we can study it in animals like roundworms to make new discoveries that can help improve human health. In my lab, we use the tiny worm called Caenorhabditis elegans to study how Mediator works in cells. We discovered that one particular Mediator protein acts like a cytoprotective factors: it helps cells remove foreign substances like drugs and toxins, and making whole animals resistant to such stress. Moreover, this protein interacts with others that are known to help cancers become drug resistant. Therefore, targeting this one Mediator protein could be a new cancer treatment. However, we do not yet know how this works at the level of molecules, which prevents us from targeting this specific protein to improve human health. Our goal is to determine how this Mediator protein works, thus laying the foundation for developing new Mediator-targeting cancer drugs.