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Lineberger Fellows Awards are announced; program encourages students to pursue cancer research

By SHELLIE BYRUM
UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center

CHAPEL HILL -- Three University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate students recently received the 2003 Lineberger Fellows Award for excellence in research that could help advance the field of oncology.

Chad Pearson, Stephanie Nick McElhinny and Qin Feng received the awards from the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. The center’s Board of Visitors honors graduate students annually by awarding a $3,000 stipend to Lineberger Fellows for research support. The program began in 1987 to promote and encourage graduate students to pursue cancer research.

Pearson is a graduate student with the College of Arts and Sciences’ department of biology. Under the direction of Drs. Kerry Bloom and Ted Salmon, Pearson studies the role of protein polymers called microtubules during mitosis, which is the process of cell division. Microtubules attach to and generate the cell’s chromosomes during mitosis to help pull them apart. When the cell divides, two new identical cells are formed. But errors in the division may lead to cancer. Microtubules could be altered in order to slow down the rapid cell division in the cases of cancer, said Pearson.

Nick McElhinny studies under the direction of Dr. Dale Ramsden in the School of Medicine’s department of biochemistry and biophysics. She studies the enzyme polymerase mu, involved in the repair of DNA double strand breaks, which happen daily due to cellular and environmental causes. Double strand breaks are dangerous because they make a genome unstable and can lead to cancer.

Nick McElhinny has learned that polymerase mu helps repair these breaks more accurately, which could protect against genomic instability and the development of cancer.

Feng is performing research under the supervision of Dr. Yi Zhang in the department of biochemistry and biophysics. Within a new field of research called epigenetics, Feng examines the human Dot1-like enzyme, which regulates transcription through the modification of structural proteins that DNA strands surround in nucleosomes (part of chromosomes). Called histones, these proteins play an important part in genetics.

If this enzyme could be modified, said Feng, it could have an effect on the type of proteins that it eventually generates. If one can manipulate a protein contributing to the growth of cancer, one could potentially stop the cancer.

Financial support from the following people, some of whom are members of the Lineberger Center board, made the fellowships possible: Shepard B. and Boyce Ansley of Atlanta; Ruby and Harry M. Bryant Sr. of Gastonia; Rochelle Grubb of Lexington; Alice Lineberger Harney, Joseph W. and Anna Boyce Lineberger, and Anna and Verner E. Stanley Jr., all of Charlotte; Elizabeth Lineberger Lyon of Portland, Ore.; and Cason and C. Heide Trask Jr. of Wilmington.

The Lineberger Center’s mission is to reduce cancer occurrence and death statewide and nationwide through research, treatment, training and outreach. The center is one of the 38 National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer centers.

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Lineberger Center contact: Dianne Shaw, (919) 966-5905
News Services contact: Deb Saine, (919) 962-8415 or deborah_saine@unc.edu