Research experience paved the way to medical school for two U of L students

caroline.zentner — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 16:46:24 +0000

Being involved in research as undergraduate students at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge confirmed their interest in medical school for both Dr. Harshil Patel and Kamiko Bressler (BSc ’18, MSc ’19).

While Patel completed his Doctor of Medicine at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Calgary this spring, Bressler begins her coursework online at the U of C’s Cumming School of Medicine this month. As undergrads, they worked on research in Dr. Nehal Thakor’s lab in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry. Thakor is a Campus Alberta Innovation Program (CAIP) Chair of Synthetic Biology and RNA-based Systems.

Both found their participation in the research in Thakor’s lab helped them refine their career goals and gave them transferable skills.

Kamiko Bressler

“I knew I wanted to do something involving science and I always thought it would be really interesting to be in a health-care field, but research really helped me figure out definitely that I want to pursue medicine,” says Bressler.

“If I choose to do a research-based practice, where I could be a researcher and a clinician, having those skills and that early exposure at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge will help me set up any research projects that I want to do in the future,” says Patel.

Patel and Bressler were among the first students to work with Thakor when he arrived at the U of L in 2014, so they had the opportunity to participate in setting up the lab.

Dr. Harshil Patel

“It was great to understand the entire procedure of what happens behind the scenes,” says Patel. “A lot of it was learning how to be a little bit of a manager and figuring out what the day-to-day procedures are for running a lab, understanding the processes of how we actually get our products, chemicals and reagents to how we contact other labs for protocols, troubleshooting and sharing results.”

“Getting to participate in research really gives you hands-on experience that I think is so unique to U of L,” says Bressler. “You’re able to see how research you’re doing in the lab can actually make a difference, how it might one day progress to actually helping people in the real world.”

Along with lab techniques, Bressler says she learned how research works and contributes to science as well as other skills, like how to communicate and collaborate with others. She and Patel were co-authors on the lab’s first review article publication in 2016.

“In our lab in particular, there were undergrads working with grad students and our supervisor, Nehal, was always so excellent,” says Bressler. “He would help us in the lab, hands-on all the time, and we’d work with other labs and even other schools. It was really neat to see all that come together to form an idea.”

Patel, a graduate of Lethbridge Collegiate Institute, was accepted into the U of C’s medical school when he was in his third year. He began his residency this summer.

Bressler, who’s originally from Medicine Hat, has been working in the Registrar’s Office at the U of L since completing her master’s. In addition to her online coursework, she plans to move to Calgary in August to be ready for the possibility of more in-person work beginning in September.

U of L researchers working to unravel the mystery behind one of the deadliest forms of cancer

caroline.zentner — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 18:24:00 +0000

A team of researchers at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge is conducting research in a quest to uncover the mechanisms that make glioblastoma such an aggressive cancer, with hope the results could lead to new therapeutic interventions in the future.

Glioblastoma (GBM), the brain cancer that killed Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip and former American senator John McCain, has a dismal prognosis and survival rate.

The research team includes, from left to right, Dr. Nehal Thakor, Campus Alberta Innovation Program Chair, Dr. Joe Ross, postdoctoral fellow, and graduate students Keiran Vanden Dungen and Kamiko Bressler.

“The median survival rate is about 15 months, even after chemotherapy, surgical removal of the tumour and radiation therapy,” says Dr. Nehal Thakor, a professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry and Campus Alberta Innovation Program Chair of Synthetic Biology and RNA-based Systems. “We are trying to understand how these cancer cells bypass cell-death pathways.”

Cell death, or apoptosis, occurs as a normal and controlled part of growth and development. In glioblastoma, cancer cells evade death, even after treatment, and continue to multiply in an uncontrolled fashion.

“What we’re really trying to understand is how these cancer cells are so good at surviving when they’re not supposed to,” says Dr. Joe Ross, a postdoctoral fellow in Thakor’s lab. “Why are they so good at surviving chemotherapy and radiation? It turns out that one of the things they’re really good at doing is translating proteins and the wrong types of proteins when they’re not supposed to.”

The team is focusing on mRNA (messenger RNA) and the factors that regulate translation of mRNAS that are involved in cell survival mechanisms. Messenger RNA carries genetic information from DNA to the ribosome, the part of the cell in charge of protein synthesis that allows important bodily functions to be carried out. In particular, Thakor and his team are looking into eukaryotic initiation factor 5B (eIF5B), a protein involved in the accurate initiation of translation from mRNA to protein.

“The eIF5B protein has been shown to play a role in normal translation but when cancer cells hijack normal processes and make them do abnormal things or make too much of certain proteins, that can cause the cells to evade apoptosis, or programmed cell death,” says Kamiko Bressler, a master’s student who is part of the team. “Glioblastoma is especially good at that, which is why it’s so hard to treat.”

The study has shown that eIF5B is important for the translation of several proteins that all play anti-death roles, says Ross. That creates a double whammy because not only do the cells not die when they’re supposed to, they also grow faster than they should.

Thakor and his team, which also includes Mikayla Fredriksen, Divya Sharma, Keiran Vanden Dungen and Nirujah Balasingam, recently learned their study, titled Eukaryotic initiation factor 5B (eIF5B) provides a critical cell survival switch to glioblastoma cells via regulation of apoptosis, has been accepted for publication in the Cell Death & Disease journal (SpringerNature/CDD press).

The team is now working with brain-tumour stem cells (BTSCs) to see if the cancer cells will grow in the absence of eIF5B or if they become more sensitized to therapeutic interventions. BTSCs are the main cause of relapse.

“If we can target eIF5B using a small molecular compound, then we can treat not only glioblastoma but other types of cancer that have similar mechanisms in place,” says Thakor. “This proof-of-concept project has the potential to decode information related to the clinical management of GBM and will have an important beneficial impact on the health of Canadians.”

UNews - Kamiko Bressler

Research experience paved the way to medical school for two U of L students

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U of L researchers working to unravel the mystery behind one of the deadliest forms of cancer

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