Helen Chamberlin, professor, molecular genetics; and Adriana Dawes, assistant professor, mathematics, and molecular genetics; are co-PI’s on a unique, new, four-year $1,280,030 NSF/NIH (DMS/NIGMS) grant.

This NSF/NIH program, which is an initiative to support research at the interface of the biological and mathematical sciences, is funding Chamberlin and Dawes’ collaboration on, "Phenotype engineering by a signaling network modification.”

Very simply put, they are trying to see what goes wrong during cell division that can cause such things as cancer and what might be done to prevent this from happening.

The funding for this project, from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Mathematical Sciences, and the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, is distinctly novel.

“The award they received was from a solicitation funded jointly by NSF and NIH,” said Anne Moffatt of Ohio State’s Office of Sponsored Programs.

“The proposals were reviewed by both agencies and then one of the two was assigned to fund and manage those deemed fundable. Helen and Adriana’s was one of those selected and assigned to NSF for funding. However, the investigators are asked to acknowledge both agencies in their publications."

Chamberlin also is an associate director of the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) and Dawes is an MBI affiliated faculty member.

“The grant proposal actually grew out of a RUMBA (Research for Undergraduates: adventures in Mathematical Biology and its Applications) collaborative project,” Dawes said.

RUMBA was an NSF-funded program which supported undergraduate students as they pursued a research project.

“Helen and I worked with a total of seven undergraduates, from both math and biology programs, on this earlier RUMBA project.

“Although the RUMBA funding is over, our new grant provides support for both undergraduate and graduate students to continue this research.”

“We focus on understanding the molecular processes underlying organogenesis. Organs are an important functional level of organization for cells within animals,” Chamberlin said. “Within an organ, cells of different types coordinate their development, and proper development is critical for normal function.

“In humans, defects in organ development underlie a variety of birth defects, and mutations in genes important for normal organogenesis are associated with tumors.”

So, clearly, understanding these fundamental aspects of organogenesis should provide insight into human disease.

To do that, to put it bluntly, Chamberlin looks at how cell division occurs in worms.

Chamberlin’s lab also looks at what processes and molecules make cells within an organ different from each other; and what makes cells within an organ different from other cells in the animal.

Answers to these questions are critical to understanding what goes wrong in a cell that could cause cancer.

The new grant has down-the-road relevance to the developing area of “personalized medicine.”

They are looking at signaling in the egg-laying system development of nematodes to see what changes in response to stimuli and if those changes could be engineered.

“We are defining steps through modeling an experiment of the potential implications of a frequently overlooked pathway, WNT. Investigating the importance of WNT in the signaling process will be our direct focus.

Studies have shown that the same type of breast tumor cells in one patient may be responsive to a specific drug, while in another patient with the same tumor, they are not.

Their goal is to try understand how signaling differs—in different species or in individuals in a given population, which may show how slight differences can result in different responses to drug treatment.

The outcome could lead to being able to modify cells so that they are more responsive to treatment rather than make harsher drugs.

“However, personalized medicine is a very long-term application of what we’re doing,” Chamberlin said.