Haixia Niu
Project – Identification of RXR Signaling in Bone Marrow Adipocytes and B Precursor Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia
Summary – Study the relationship between bone marrow fat cells and blood cells to better understand how they initiate leukemia and prevent future relapse in patients.
2018 Pelotonia Participant – Rider: 25 miles
Watch as Haixia shares more details about her research project.
Benjamin Sunkel
Project – Novel Tumor Suppressive Role of Phosphodiesterases in Prostate Cancer
Summary – Investigate the safety of prescribing certain drugs to individuals following prostatectomy in order to reveal new biological pathways contributing to prostate cancer growth. Defining these pathways is an important step towards identifying prostate cancer earlier, treating prostate cancer more effectively and potentially limiting the risk of prostate cancer onset and recurrence.
2018 Pelotonia Participant – Rider: 100 miles
Watch as Benjamin shares more details about his research project.
Safiya Khurshid
Project – Targeting Insulin Receptor Alternative Splicing to Treat Pediatric Rhabdomyosarcoma
Summary – Demonstrate how to impede the IGF2 pathway by reducing INR-A expression via antisense nucleotide (ASO) technology, which modulates the levels of INR-A in the Rhabdomyosarcoma cell lines, and consequently mitigate tumor hallmarks like cell-proliferation, migration and angiogenesis.
2018 Pelotonia Participant – Rider: 25 miles
Watch as Safiya shares more details about her research project.
Kirti Kaul
Project – Analyze Slit2-Mediated Metabolic Reprogramming Mechanisms That Inhibit Tumor Growth and Metastasis
Summary – Study the role the immune cells play in regulating and slowing metastatic cancer growth. Specifically, whether a protein called Slit2, which is naturally expressed in healthy individuals but suppressed in breast cancer patients, exerts antitumor activity by altering cell energy production and use.
2018 Pelotonia Participant – Virtual rider
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Larissa Valle Guilhen Longo
Project – Unraveling the Regulation of β-glucan Synthase Bgs1 and Dynamics of Septum Formation During Fission Yeast Cytokinesis
Summary – Study the interaction of proteins involved in the cell division process in yeast, which is very similar to plant, animal and even human cells. Understanding these mechanisms in yeast can provide insights to understand and, consequently, fight cancer.
2018 Pelotonia Participant – Rider
Christoph Weigel
Project – Epigenetic Changes in Blood Cancer
Summary – Develop a new blood cancer model based on isolated cells from healthy donors to study epigenetic changes in cells and the role these changes play in both cancer development and progression. The goal is to identify new ways to use specific tumor characteristics to detect and treat blood cancer in the future.
2018 Pelotonia Participant – Virtual rider
Megan Zavorka Thomas
Project – S100A8 and S1009A Proteins in TKI Resistance in FLT3-ITD-Positive Acute Myeloid Leukemia
Summary – Study differences in cellular proteins after chemotherapy treatment in an effort to understand why certain AML patients develop recurrent disease and to identify new molecular targets for better drug therapy in AML.
Watch as Megan shares more details about her research project