November 7, 2007 Jenna R. Mollison tonight was named the recipient of the Annette Boman Women's Fellowship for Cancer Research at an event hosted at the Medical School that included presentations related to cancer research. Chosen from several nominees, Mollison is a second year Integrated Biosciences graduate student conducting cancer research related to stem cell characteristics. The Fellowship will support her research.
A resident of Hermantown, Mollison completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth with a major in cell biology in 2006. She is investigating the differences between cancer cell origins and how those differences may influence their response to chemotherapeutic drugs. Mollison spent more than two months last summer in Portugal working with Paulo J. Oliveira, Ph.D. in cellular biology, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. Professors Edward Perkins, Ph.D. and Jon Holy, Ph.D. are her advisors at the Medical School.
The Fellowship award honors the memory of Annette Boman, a gifted medical researcher at the University of Minnesota Medical School – Duluth Campus who died as a result of complications from cancer in 2003. Annette graduated summa cum laude with a degree in physics from Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota. She earned a Ph.D. in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health and at Emory University. In 1998 she joined the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics as an assistant professor and received more than $900,000 in research grants, including one from the American Cancer Society.
Other speakers at the event, included:
Kenneth Dornfeld, M.D. on Metabolic Opportunities to Improve Cancer Therapy. Keynote speaker, Dornfeld is in the department of radiology and oncology at the Duluth Clinic. He is interested in developing cancer treatments that combine traditional agents with manipulations of mitochondrial activity.
Teresa Rose-Hellekant, Ph.D. on her research into early detection of breast cancer. Rose-Hellekant presented how her team is using a mouse model of breast cancer to help identify novel molecules that may be useful for breast cancer screening.
Robert Cormier, Ph.D. on colorectal cancer gene discovery: genetic variation in host and disease. People are susceptible or resistant to specific diseases based on their genetic makeup and diseases such as cancer are also genetically unique with specific sets of genes altered in the progression of each cancer. More effective therapies for cancer will depend on combining knowledge of a patient’s genes with information on the genetic changes in their cancer.
Anya Gybina, Ph.D. candidate and past recipient of the Annette Boman Fellowship. Gybina studies how a diet deficient in copper, an essential element for normal human brain development, affects brain glucose metabolism in young rats, which are a model for human brain development.
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