The process of making proteins, the complex molecules that do most of the jobs required for life, can go awry at any stage, and turn a normal cell into a cancerous one.
Christina Termini, a cancer cell biologist who joined Fred Hutch Cancer Center in 2022, has won a $600,000, three-year award from the V Foundation for Cancer Research to study how a late stage of that process affects treatment for the deadliest blood cancer, acute myeloid leukemia, or AML.
Her project focuses on what happens after the genetic instructions for making proteins have been translated into sequences of amino acids, when the proteins acquire some add-ons before reporting for duty.
Those add-ons — a garland of fats tacked on here, a ribbon of sugars attached there — can significantly modify how the protein interacts with other molecules.
“The function of a molecule can be completely different depending on whether it has certain structures attached to it or not,” Termini said. “That’s what’s gotten me jazzed as a scientist for a long time.”
