FINDING THEIR PLACE HELENE MCMURRAY, PH.D. Background: She is a UR School of Medicine & Dentistry alumna, earning her Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology and completing a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical genetics there. She joined the Pathology faculty in 2017 and recently completed national and state board certification to serve as assistant director of the Tissue Typing/Histocompatibility Lab at Strong Memorial. She is also director of the pathology graduate program. Current research: Active research collaborations with colleagues at Wilmot Cancer Institute and the departments of Biomedical Genetics, and Biostatistics and Computational Biology, applying approaches in genomics, bioinformatics, biostatistics, and cell and molecular biology. How would you describe the process of climbing the academic ladder? It’s like gardening. You start off with a couple of pea plants and, if you’re lucky, by the end of your career you’ll end up with a whole garden—a body of work that’s your area of expertise. You have a background in different specialties. What do you like about this department, specifically? I really appreciate the opportunities that I have found in pathology. It is a different world from the basic science departments I’ve been in. The demands on your time and brain are constantly shifting but I’ve found it really engaging to go back and forth between different ways of thinking—sometimes with very urgent problems for our patients and sometimes abstract concepts related to gene regulation or cancer biology. It’s been really enjoyable and I’m proud that I’ve been able to be successful in all those places. What is challenging about balancing your research and clinical work? We have a treasure trove of clinical samples in my lab but using them for research is separate from our main clinical workflows. As scientists, we all have a lot of ideas that could be impactful but, at the end of the day, our patients need their testing done. I think simply finding time to work on all the interesting questions you identify is a challenge for people trying to work both clinically and scientifically. What inspires you to press on? If you like scientific exploration and discovery, there’s nothing else that’s really like that in the world. It’s a little bit like the people who quit their jobs and travel the world instead. I’m not a world traveler at heart but I like digging into the minutia of biology and trying to understand things that nobody has understood before. The "Star Trek" mentality of “boldly going where no one has gone before” is the mindset I have existed in since I was 16 years old and started working in my first scientific lab. One way or another, I will always want to ask questions about things no one understands and then try to figure out the answers. That leads to a lot of frustration some of the time, but if you’ve gone this far, you figure out how to overcome that and keep going.
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ZHENQIANG YAO, B.MED., PH.D. Background: He was a postdoctoral researcher recruited to the department by Dr. Brendan Boyce in 2003. Yao has established and grown his own research program at URMC since 2015 when he got his first R01 research project from the NIH, with a second R01 to be announced soon. Yao has also received research funding from the Department of Defense and New York State Department of Health. Current research: Yao’s lab investigates projects related to musculoskeletal disease (osteoporosis) and breast cancer. Yao’s team is investigating how immune cells, particularly T lymphocytes, interact with bone cells to cause bone loss with aging. They are also developing a new agent to treat osteoporosis, and recently developed a novel macrophage-based targeted therapy to prevent and eliminate breast cancer metastases, in hopes that it can be expanded to treat other cancers including lung, pancreatic and prostate. Why did you choose to step away from practicing medicine? Research is what pushes the boundaries of clinical practice. As a doctor you see many patients affected by osteoporosis and cancer. I realized that you could work your whole life and see the same problems without finding ways to make patient care better. I want to do work that will benefit patients, today and into the future. Was there a moment that you are proud of, or made you sure that you were in the right profession? Yes, there have been a few. When I was working in Dr. Boyce’s lab, I discovered a new osteoclast forming pathway limited by non-canonical NF-kB signaling. These findings helped earn my first NIH R01 in 2015. More recently, I proposed a new NIH project to investigate age-related osteoporosis and to test our newly patented agent to treat osteoporosis, which was top-ranked during the review process. Getting funding for cancer research is extremely competitive. I’m proud that my method to treat breast cancer was recently awarded by the Department of Defense, which funded just six percent of 500 applications. What keeps you going? Research can be difficult. You spend a lot of time writing grant applications in a way that should be easily understood by your peers. You also spend more time working to get funding and get published than you do at the bench. I have been doing research, not only as a scientist but also a clinical practitioner, to explain diseases using data I gather every day. I hope that my discoveries can be translated to the bedside to improve patient care, and that’s what keeps me going.
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