UNMC student awarded NCI cancer research grant

Shrabasti Roychoudhury, a graduate student in the UNMC Department of Genetics, Cell Biology & Anatomy, has been awarded the prestigious National Cancer Institute Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Fellow Transition Award.

The award provides six years of funding — two years to complete pre-doctoral work and four years of post-doctoral work — and is designed to help cancer researchers complete their dissertation research training and transition to mentored, cancer-focused postdoctoral career development research positions.

Roychoudhury, a mentee of Kishor Bhakat, Ph.D., will be working on mechanism involved in chemotherapeutic resistance. The research proposal outlines a training plan for becoming an independent cancer researcher with a focus in cancer therapy and resistance.

Therapy resistance is a daunting problem in cancer management, Dr. Bhakat said.

“A particular DNA damage-repair protein, called AP Endonuclease 1 (APE1), is often overexpressed and post-translationally modified in many types of cancer. When it is overexpressed, the cancer cells become resistant to many chemotherapeutic drugs, including radiation therapy,” he said.

“So, the idea is that maybe the elevated levels of acetylated form of this protein may contribute to the drug resistance of the cancer cells. But to understand the mechanism, we have to first understand how this modification helps repair drug-induced damage in the DNA.”

“Most of the chemotherapeutic agents, directly or indirectly damage DNA,” Roychoudhury said. “So, if DNA damage-repair proteins are highly active, they can repair it causing resistance to therapy.

“In my predoc work, I want to study how base damage-repair proteins can cause resistance to chemotherapeutic treatment, and in my postdoc, I want to study the basis of immunotherapeutic resistance.”

If Roychoudhury’s research can help explain how the protein is inducing drug resistance, researchers may be able to find a way to work around it, Dr. Bhakat said.

The award is a relatively new initiative for the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, designed to support young scientists who are actively engaged in cancer research. Only one student from an institution can be nominated. When Roychoudhury was informed she would be, she said, she was equal parts excited and nervous.

Dr. Bhakat has no reservations about his mentee, whom he recruited in 2014 and who was coming off a prestigious publication in the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology when her nomination was submitted.

“She is very talented and independent thinking, and ultimately the project proposal was very strong,” he said. “Our lab and our department feel excited that she got this award, which can herald the new beginning of a young scientist in the cancer research field.”