Moray scientist pioneers research at Harvard
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AN ELGIN man is carrying out pioneering research in America which could be central to improving our understanding of cancer – aided by a colony of frogs.
Gary McDowell is working at the Children’s Hospital in Boston, and Harvard Medical School, trying to identify how cells decide when to grow, divide and specialise into particular types of cells.
The former pupil of Greenwards Primary and Elgin Academy took up the three-year post after completing a PhD in oncology at Cambridge University, during which time the Medical Research Council funded his work on treating brain tumours – specifically gliomas, which are formed from glial cells in the brain.
“My lab was looking at ways in which we might convince these cells to become neurons instead – the specialised brain cells which can’t divide easily. If the tumour cells specialise, they stop dividing, and you stop the tumour,” Gary said.
In search of cells for his work, he came across the South African frog, Xenopus laevis, which is special because it lays lots of large eggs at once.
Now on the other side of the Atlantic, and having published a number of papers on his doctorate findings, Gary is again being aided by amphibians as he looks at how cells decide to specialise.
He said: “Bizarrely, as a chemist, ending up working with frogs was slightly unusual, and I never thought it would be very relevant after my PhD. But the more I used frogs in my research, the more I realised that they offer really good opportunities for solving lots of problems in medical biology.
“There aren’t huge numbers of people working with frogs, but to chemists who want to look at chemical problems in biology, the idea that you can have a cell in a test tube is very exciting.”
At the moment, he is using the process known as mass spectrometry, which involves a machine, often used for identifying drugs in forensics, which smashes up molecules to enable the identification of their make-up.
“You can do this with proteins too, to see what they are made of, and you can even try to do it with whole cells, to look at all the proteins in a cell at once.
“This is what I am trying to do; frogs lay these big eggs which are stuffed full of protein. So you can get embryos to develop in different ways, or look at different parts of an embryo, to see what is going on inside particular cells. This is special because many proteins are known which cause cancer or other diseases, but this is usually by identifying one protein behaving unusually in a cell.
See full story in Friday's Northern Scot
