Karin Hardiman
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Medicine & Clinical Research
Rectal cancer affects about 40,000 people a year in the US. It is usually treated with chemoradiation, a combination of chemotherapy and radiation.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biochemistry
Biology
- Topics
rectal cancer
gastrointestinal cancer
GI adenocarcinoma
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Determine whether the sialic-acid-adding enzyme ST6Gal-1 makes rectal cancer cells resist chemoradiation by inhibiting apoptosis, using cell sorting, sequencing, shRNA knockdown and patient tumor samples.
- Test whether extracellular vesicles carrying ST6Gal-1 transfer chemoradiation resistance between rectal cancer sub-clones by spreading protein sialylation and reducing cell death in recipient cells.
- Determine whether the enzyme BACE1 increases rectal cancer sensitivity to chemoradiation partly by cleaving ST6Gal-1, building on its higher expression in complete responders and on inhibitor studies.
More about the research
About 85% of patients respond incompletely or poorly, which raises their risk that the cancer returns. Tumors contain sub-clones, groups of cancer cells with different traits. The lab has found that poor responders carry sub-clones that resist treatment, and that these sub-clones are rich in an enzyme called ST6Gal-1. ST6Gal-1 attaches sialic acid, a negatively charged sugar, to proteins headed for the cell surface, which can change how those proteins work. The team has also found that ST6Gal-1 increases in rectal cancer models after chemoradiation.
Why it matters
Most rectal cancer patients respond poorly to chemoradiation and face higher risks of recurrence and spread. Revealing how ST6Gal-1 and vesicle-carried resistance protect tumor cells could point to new drug targets. These might overcome resistance in several sub-clones at once. Because chemoradiation before surgery is standard for other gastrointestinal adenocarcinomas too, such targets may eventually help patients beyond rectal cancer.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xiangrong Qi
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Build an interpretable radiomics pipeline that uses a convolutional neural network to extract features from multi-modal images, with multi-objective feature selection and a model interpreter, to predict rectal cancer response to radiation.
Lucia R. Languino
Thomas Jefferson University, PA·Biology
Test whether NgR2 carried in small extracellular vesicles causes tumor growth, neuroendocrine differentiation, and metastasis after transfer to other cells, using SILAC-based proteomics.
Yekaterina Zaytseva
University of Kentucky, KY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether FASN overproduction in colorectal cancer cells, through the exosomes they release, turns liver hepatic stellate cells into tumor-supporting fibroblasts, using genetic changes and the FASN inhibitor TVB-2640.
The school
University of Alabama at Birmingham: 45 labs on PI Pages, $866M a year on research, 166 research doctorates a year.
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