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h5>Dr. Carla Van Den Berg |
The frustrations of setting up a new lab
were quite obvious 10 minutes into our interview when the lab
manager rushed into the office and whispered in a panicked
voice, “The tubing to the nitrogen tank blew a hole in it and
the room is filled with nitrogen.” Dr. Carla Van Den Berg,
Assistant Professor in the Division of Pharmacology/Toxicology
program, sighed. “Hopefully, our brand new microscope is okay
since the nitrogen gas was supposed to be suspending the table
it sets on,” was all she said. This is simply one small bump in
the road in the past year.
When the lab is finally in order, Van Den
Berg’s research generally spans two areas of breast cancer research
– one being, to study the effects of Insulin-like Growth Factor-I (IGF
– I) on breast cancer cells. IGF-I is similar in structure to
insulin. Normally, it plays an important role in prenatal growth
and development and a lesser role in glucose metabolism. It can
also be important to tumor cells. Many types of cancers, including
breast, prostate and colon cancers, use IGF-I to promote their
growth and survival. Dr. Van Den Berg initially became interested
in how it protects cancer cells from chemotherapy treatment when
other clinicians proposed to administer IGF-I to cancer patients to
regenerate nerve cells. Some patients experience numbness in their
extremities after receiving certain chemotherapy drugs and this
occurs because of the unwanted toxicities of chemotherapy. Dr. Van
Den Berg and her mentor were concerned that although it may improve
neuropathic symptoms in cancer patients it could also have
detrimental effects on the tumors’ response to treatment.
The second area of interest in the lab is an
intracellular kinase that is activated by chemotherapy drugs and in
turn assists in killing cells. This protein is called JNK (c-Jun
N-terminal kinase). JNK is also be activated by other stresses such
as heat, osmotic stress or cytokine exposure. “Our observation is
that IGF activates JNK in breast cancer cells. Other researchers
have reported that JNK can signal cells to move. Interestingly,
this type of movement is important for tumor cells to become
metastatic (i.e. move from the place they started to other sites in
the body). Metastasis is the most challenging part of breast cancer
treatment. We are using mouse models to understand the importance
of JNK in both tumor development and metastasis,” she said. Hence,
both IGF-I and JNK are somewhat double-edged swords but…. “Welcome
to cancer,” said Van Den Berg.
Her interest in cancer research began during
her oncology residency training at the Audie Murphy VA Hospital and
the UT Health Sciences Center in San Antonio. “I decided that I
didn’t understand what our treatments were doing to our patients,
and so I wanted to study this in more detail.” One of her
fellowships was with an oncologist/basic scientist who studied IGF-I
in breast cancer. “My goal is to figure out why chemo drugs
sometimes don’t work and also to identify better and less toxic
treatment alternatives,” she said. After her fellowship training,
Dr. Van Den Berg was an Assistant/Associate Professor at the
University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in the School of
Pharmacy. There she received research funding from organizations
like the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the Department of Defense, the
National Institute of Health, and others. Just before her move to
Austin, she received a grant from The National Institute of Health,
which gave her research on JNK a highly enthusiastic score. Van Den
Berg’s current lab consists of one postdoctoral fellow, four
graduate students, two research assistants and a summer
undergraduate student. All but two of these people started in the
lab just this summer. Once the growing pains have started to
subside, Dr. Van Den Berg said that she looks forward to taking
advantage of the many excellent resources here and interacting with
various faculty at UT, Austin.
