A Deeper Look at Colorectal Cancer
by chem nerd on Feb.07, 2010, under ChemSem 04, _Spring 2010
Last Thursday’s seminar was brought to us by Amanda Hummon, currently an assistant professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at the University of Notre Dame. She completed her A.B. in Chemistry at Cornell University and received her Ph.D. in analytical chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She then conducted her postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute, NIH. Hummon did a great job presenting her research on cancer, she was very personable, and seemed very interested in what she was doing and sharing it.
In a nut shell, Hummon is researching the transcriptome and the proteome in cancer cells to gain a better understanding of which genes, transcripts, and proteins are affected, ultimately hoping to identify an effective therapeutic intervention. Her focus is on colorectal cancer which she later explained should be referred to as two separate cancers since they affect two different organs. Hummon began by identifying the problematic chromosomes that contribute to colorectal cancer. She accomplished this by identifying the deregulated pathways that are contributing to the cancer phenotype, distinguished by aberrantly expressed genes, and analyzed their products, and the effect that they had on downstream targets.
From her very informative talk I learned that although colorectal cancer affects many people there is not a lot of research in this area due to funding and awareness, another thing I learned was that through special sampling mass spectrometry can be applied to cancer cells, and a person affected with colon disease has 58 chromosomes!
The only questions I have are 1. How do you get the cancer samples you use? 2. Of all the cancers, what lead you specifically to colon cancer? 3. What are your ideas of therapeutic intervention? Do they include gene therapy? And is this something that could be passed down to future generations?
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