News

Professor and Department Head Dr. Carol Gregorio was recently elected to the position of Councilor for the Association of Anatomy, Cell Biology, and Neurobiology Chairpersons.

Michelle Ennabe, CMM Master's Student, is one of three Masters Awardees of this year's prestigious Centennial Achievement Award.

Work from Donata Vercelli, PhD's laboratory recently featured in the Washington Post shows that living in traditional farming environments means living in a place that is extremely rich in microbes — the right microbes that our immune system has evolved to live with and learn from. The constellation of organisms found in soil and on farm animals programs how a child responds to allergens throughout her lifetime.

Asthma and COPD are the most commonly diagnosed chronic lung diseases in the United States. While it is now recognized that a percentage of severe asthmatics develop fixed airway obstruction, little is known pertaining to the basic underlying mechanisms of this progression. Dr. Ledford's research will examine the role of club cell secreted protein (CC16) in the context of airway infection as a previously overlooked link in understanding this progression.

Curtis Thorne, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, and doctoral student Carly R. Cabel recently undertook an ambitious study to determine whether therapeutic targeting of LRP6 – a cell-surface receptor protein that mediates cell growth of its surrounding tissue environment - was a suitable treatment strategy for colon cancer, thus challenging the current scientific dogma and approaches to patient care. The results of Dr. Thorne and Ms. Cabel's experiments were published in a letter in the June 2019 issue of Developmental Cell.

A major unmet clinical need is to distinguish cancer that is non-aggressive (low risk) versus those that are aggressive (high risk). Using the gene editing core service in the UA Cancer Center (led by Dr. Nathan Ellis), members of the CressLab in collaboration with two other CMM faculty (Drs. Cindy Miranti and Noel Warfel) found that tumors use a specific modification of an adhesion receptor called α6 integrin to generate invasive aggressive networks.

John Ryniawec (GPMM student), Dan Buster, PhD, Gregory Rogers, PhD and their collaborators recently published a new study in the journal Developmental Cell. They show a new mechanism linking the centrosome biogenesis machinery with the mitotic spindle orientation apparatus in Drosophila stem cells. Their work also reveals a new role for the kinase Polo-like kinase 4 in promoting centrosome disassembly.

Congratulations to Samantha Harris, PhD for her promotion to full Professor, and to Julie Ledford, PhD for her promotion to Associate Professor!

New graduate program at the UA College of Medicine – Tucson will begin in fall Semester 2019. Genetic counseling one of nation’s fastest-growing careers.