Ryne Holmberg, 2022 Alison Huxford Memorial Fellow
Samantha N. Cohen, 2021 Alison Huxford Fellow
About the Fellow: Ryne Holmberg is a graduate of Point Loma Nazarene University. He entered the graduate program in Chemistry & Biochemistry at SDSU as a direct admit doctoral student in 2016 and advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in 2019. Ryne’s doctoral research aims to understand how signaling to induce transcription factor NF-κB activity influences the ability of tumor initiator cells to survive chemotherapy and promote relapse in ovarian cancer patients who have entered remission. Ryne’s studies have demonstrated that an inflammatory cytokine known as TWEAK and its receptor Fn14 are highly expressed in ovarian tumors following chemotherapy and that TWEAK treatment of cultured ovarian cancer cells promotes their tumor-like behavior. Interfering with the NF-κB pathway that responds to TWEAK prolongs survival in mice with ovarian cancer after chemotherapy, suggesting that the TWEAK-Fn14-induced NF-κB signaling pathway is a promising target for the development of therapies to improve the outcomes of ovarian cancer patients.
About the Fellow: Samantha Cohen is a graduate of UC Riverside. She entered the graduate program in Chemistry & Biochemistry at SDSU in 2015 and advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in 2018. Sam’s doctoral research centers upon understanding how cells control the activity of the important signaling enzyme known as the IκB Kinase (IKK) complex. This enzyme is largely responsible for the cellular decision to mount a genetically encoded response to any of a number of diverse potentially harmful environmental stimuli by unleashing the gene expression potential of transcription factor NF-κB. Sam is taking the novel approach of engineering, expressing, purifying, and directly studying a version of the IKK complex that functions in a key innate immune signaling pathway in fruit flies. Her work is providing some of the first direct structural and biochemical measurements of this fascinating enzyme complex.