Abigail Xie, a current student in the Tri-I MD-PhD Program, has been awarded an F30 Research Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Ms. Xie is a PhD student doing reseach in the Finley Lab at the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
She recieved this grant to support her project "Metabolic vulnerabilities in cancers with impaired TCA cycle activity," which she contextualized by saying:
"Cancer cells require a continuous supply of metabolic building blocks to fuel malignant proliferation, and yet some tumors arise following genetic disruption of critical metabolic pathways, including the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle. How tumors cope with impaired TCA cycle activity—and whether the pathways that compensate for TCA cycle disruption can be targeted—remains largely unknown. The goal of this project is to determine whether a subset of tumors with impaired TCA cycle activity have limited metabolic plasticity in generating critical biosynthetic intermediates, rendering them susceptible to metabolic inhibition as a novel treatment strategy."
Abigail Xie