A 2011 CPRIT Recruitment of Rising Stars award lured Joshua Mendell, M.D., Ph.D., to The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, from Johns Hopkins University. Now that his laboratory is well established in Dallas, he’s staying put, along with 20 additional researchers, students, and technicians.
Dr. Mendell’s research focuses on how genes are controlled and how genetic regulatory pathways go awry in diseases like cancer. His research has opened up potential new avenues for cancer treatment.
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A 2011 CPRIT Recruitment of Rising Stars award lured Joshua Mendell, M.D., Ph.D., to The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, from Johns Hopkins University. Now that his laboratory is well established in Dallas, he’s staying put, along with 20 additional researchers, students, and technicians.
Dr. Mendell’s research focuses on how genes are controlled and how genetic regulatory pathways go awry in diseases like cancer. His research has opened up potential new avenues for cancer treatment.
Genes are the human genome’s recipes for proteins, which are made by copying the gene’s DNA sequences into RNA, which in turn are used as the blueprints for proteins. Much of cancer research focuses on defects, or mutations, in certain protein-coding genes that cause cancer.
But only two percent of the human genome actually contains the recipes for proteins. Most of the rest was once called “junk” DNA. But it turns out, these long stretches of DNA between genes aren’t necessarily junk.
Some of these segments still make RNA, but the RNA doesn’t make a protein. These are called non-coding RNAs. One of the types of noncoding RNAs Dr. Mendell studies are called “microRNAs” because of their very short length — about a hundredth of the length of a typical coding RNA.
It turns out that these microRNAs are vital for regulating the genes that do encode proteins — in much the same way that a faucet regulates the flow of water in a sink. In cancers, many of these microRNA “faucets” are out of whack. Some are turned too low, and pump up genes that create cancers. Others are turned too high, reducing to a trickle genes that would otherwise prevent cancers from forming.
MicroRNAs are already being used as therapeutic targets in clinical trials, and by figuring out the functions of microRNAs in normal physiology and how they go awry in cancer, Dr, Mendell is helping to identify new microRNAs that could be useful in treating cancer.
Dr. Mendell also was part of a team that found that microRNA pathways are a major contributor to Wilms tumors, the most common type of kidney cancer in children.
“The microRNA pathway seems to play an especially important role in several cancers that occur in children, such as Wilms tumor, so we are particularly interested in figuring out what microRNAs do in these settings,” he says, “with the ultimate hope that this will lead to new therapies.”
Dr. Mendell participates in UT Southwestern’s $11 million Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) award for kidney cancer research.
“Ultimately, the new knowledge gained from our research has significantly advanced our understanding of the roles of non-coding RNAs in tumor biology,” Dr. Mendell said. CPRIT was the major source of Mendell’s funding during his first five years in Texas. “CPRIT’s generous support has had a major impact not only on our knowledge of cancer,” he said, “but also on my career.”
Dr. Mendell was happy to bring his research to Texas. “UTSouthwestern is renowned for the strength and breadth of its basic science and its strong institutional commitment to nurture this type of work,” he says.
Dr. Mendell received his undergraduate degree in biology from Cornell University. He pursued a Ph.D. in human genetics & molecular biology, and an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University, where he remained as a postdoctoral fellow and subsequently joined the faculty in 2004.
In 2015, Dr. Mendell was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and in 2016, he received a prestigious award from The Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science of Texas. He has received additional support from CPRIT to study pediatric cancer as well as an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute.
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