Thursday, December 16, 2021
10:00 AM
ILC N101/Zoom:  Please contact mcb@mcb.umass.edu to be included on the email list for this announcement
Dissertation Title:  Extracellular matrix stiffness as a cue to shape phenotypic evolution of triple negative breast cancer
Advisor:  Shelly Peyton

Michelle Farkas, professor of chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was recently awarded a $1.25 million grant by the National Institutes of Health to develop next-generation tools to track and manipulate circadian rhythms in cells, helping researchers to understand the role that such rhythms play in disease.

The circadian clock is an internal system that helps the body respond to the time of day. Circadian clocks help regulate a number of different processes in the human body, including sleep-wake cycles, body temperature, blood pressure, food intake, hormone release, cardiac function, immune responses and metabolism. On the cellular level, circadian clocks also play a role in cellular proliferation, metabolism and DNA damage repair. Though researchers have known for years that changes to the circadian clock’s daily rhythms can lead to all sorts of diseases, including various cancers, we don’t yet know exactly what is going wrong at the cellular level when the circadian clock is altered.

“We can generate static snapshots of a cell,” says Farkas, “but they don’t tell you all that much. We need tools to help us track the dynamic changes occurring inside a cell over time.” Only then can researchers begin to see what happens when the circadian clock is altered. Read more

The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS) has announced that six campus research teams have been named recipients of the 3rd annual Manning/IALS Innovation Awards. These translational grants are designed to advance applied research and development efforts from UMass-based faculty research groups in the sciences and engineering through the development of spin-out/startup companies and the out-licensing of UMass intellectual property.

Alumnus Paul Manning and his wife, Diane, committed $1 million through their family foundation to establish the Manning Innovation Program. The gift provides three years of support in advancing a robust and sustainable commercialization pipeline of applied and translational research projects from UMass Amherst. 

MCB faculty are involved in three of the six projects that were selected from a highly competitive group of applicants:

E2-PATH: Karen Dunphy/Joe Jerry, veterinary & animal sciences. A diagnostic personalized medicine screening platform for selecting optimized breast cancer treatments.

RNA4Therapeutics: Craig Martin, chemistry. A novel manufacturing technology for the synthesis of high purity, low-cost, and large scale RNA manufacturing for therapeutic use.

Volvox Sciences: Ashish Kulkarni, chemical engineering. Developing a novel supramolecular nano-therapeutic (CSF-SNT) that can efficiently remove cancer tumor cells.

Read more

A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has announced a major new advance in understanding how our genetic information eventually translates into functional proteins—one of the building blocks of human life. The research, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), elucidates how chaperones display “selective promiscuity” for the specific proteins—their “clients”—they serve. This property enables them to play an essential role in maintaining healthy cells and is a step forward in understanding the origins of a host of human illnesses, from cancer to ALS.

The protein folding process, during which a chain of amino acids assumes its final shape as a protein, can be especially fraught. Researchers have long known that special molecules called chaperones help shepherd the protein into its final, correct shape. These “chaperones” can figure out which proteins are at risk of being deformed and can then lend that protein additional help. But how exactly they do their work has been poorly understood: “The chaperones do some kind of magic,” says Alexandra Pozhidaeva, co-lead author of the paper who contributed to this study as a postdoctoral research associate at UMass Amherst and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at UConn Health. “What we’ve done is to reveal the mechanics behind the trick.”

Not only is this breakthrough an advance in our understanding of how cells stay healthy, it has real-world applications. “Hsp70s,” says Gierasch, “are involved in so many pathological diseases, from cancer to Alzheimer’s, and host Hsp70s are exploited by parasites and viruses. Understanding how Hsp70s work can help us develop therapeutic strategies against these terrible diseases.” Read more