The Cancer Research Community

When I first came to college, I didn't anticipate doing any type of lab or clinical research. As part of the Women in Natural Sciences program, I was fortunate to be a part of the Freshman Research Initiative, and was able to participate in the Biobricks research stream, through which I was able to develop lucrative laboratory skills, specifically those more focused in biology and life sciences.

I was always interested in cancer and its research, and after my experience in the Freshman Research Initiative, I decided I wanted to get involved in some type of cancer research at UT. When I started looking, Dr. Linda deGraffenried's research at the Dell Pediatric Research Institute stood out to me. Her lab performs not only in house research, but is very involved with actual cancer treatment, clinical trials, education programs and cancer prevention at the UT San Antonio Health Science Center. She focuses specifically on breast and prostate cancer, especially their relationship to obesity and aging. I was fortunate enough to meet with her last April and be offered a spot in her lab this past August.

During the fall, I was trained in laboratory skills, such as tissue culturing and growing cells. In January I began my own project, and became "Team Prostate". When men get prostate cancer, their first line of defense is removing the prostate. Those who do, also tend to go through hormone therapy in which the androgen in their body is essentially eradicated. For most men however, the cancer tends to come back within a few years, and metastazises through out the body, making it much harder to treat. The rate of cancer spreading is even faster in obese men! My research focuses on visualizing the mechanism and the factors behind the activation of the androgen receptor, even in the presence of essentially no androgen. This could potentially help us understand and maybe even stop the relapse of cancer in these men!

This experience has allowed me to meet and hear from some great people around the country, and see that the cancer research community is just that - a community. They share their findings and present their research at conferences, and work very hard to translate the biological findings into clinical trials. When we think about cancer, we often think about those who have been physically affected by it, and not too much about those who spend their whole lives trying to understand and cure it. I ride for this community, for all that they've done to understand and stop cancer, for all the knowledge they've brought to the world, and for all that they're going to do in the coming years to help make cancer a thing of the past.

To learn more about Dr. deGraffenried's research, please visit: https://he.utexas.edu/directory/degraffenried-linda-ann