Hardy named Beckman Young Investigator

Jeanne Hardy, assistant professor of Chemistry, has received a three-year, $264,000 Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award to investigate a protein that causes sick cells to die.

Hardy’s proposal seeks to solve the problem of knowing which protein should be targeted to treat a certain disease. Currently, drugs still target only about 0.1 percent of 40,000 cellular proteins. More importantly, scientists do not have a good way to test whether blocking a specific protein would be useful for treating a disease such as cancer or Alzheimer’s.

Hardy will use the Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award to further her protein investigations. The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation of Irvine, Calif., makes grants to non-profit research institutions to promote research in chemistry and the life sciences, and particularly to foster the invention of methods, instruments and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science. The Beckman Young Investigators Program provides research support to the most promising young faculty members in the early stages of academic careers in the chemical and life sciences.

When scientists have attempted to develop drugs to treat cancer they have historically used an empirical, or “trial and error” method, to find a compound that could kill a cancer cell, Hardy notes. Proteins are the building blocks of cells, and usually the protein or proteins that a compound attacked were not known. Because the results of the trial and error method usually blocks more than one type of protein, many unwanted side effects occur. That is why cancer treatments cause patients to lose their hair and become nauseated. If there were drugs that were more specifically geared toward certain proteins, then they would be more effective and have fewer side effects, says Hardy.

Hardy’s proposal describes a way to control one type of protein, but no others in the cell by engineering the protein to be sensitive to the drug her team selects. This is called designing an allosteric trigger. It is a direct way of determining whether inactivating certain proteins could cure a particular disease and which protein should be targeted to treat which disease. The allosteric trigger technique does not delete the protein entirely from the cell and provides a rapid response, so the results demonstrate more accurately what would happen if a drug were developed that targeted a specific protein, says Hardy. Her proposal focuses on a protein called caspase-7, which is responsible for causing sick cells to die. When these proteins do not function properly, it allows cancerous cells to live, so it is a great test case for development of the allosteric trigger technique, she says.

Hardy joined the faculty last September. She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry and her master’s degree in biochemistry from Utah State University. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from the University of California, Berkeley.

April 12, 2006.

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