Rexinoid Biology

We also collaborate with Peter W. Jurutka and Carl E. Wagner for development of rexinoids for cancer and Alzheimer's Disease treatment. My work on this began when I developed a yeast assay for classroom use for testing mutagenicity and toxicity. Extending this work to collaborations allowed me to utilize my Ph.D. in Cell Regulation to help to assess rexinoids for their biological activity. This work includes analyzing gene expression changes in vivo and in culture after treatment with our novel compounds.

Pamela A. Marshall, Peter W. Jurutka, Carl E. Wagner, Arjan van der Vaart, Ichiro Kaneko, Pedro I. Chavez, Ning Ma, Jaskaran S. Bhogal, Pritika Shahani, Johnathon C. Swierski and Mairi McNeill. 2015. Analysis of differential secondary effects of novel rexinoids: select rexinoid X receptor ligands demonstrate differentiated side effect profiles.

Recent work indicates that gene expression changes can be analyzed by a novel method, the Divergence Score, which allows the researcher to determine how well a compound changes gene expression based upon the hypotheses of the study. This work was recently published in Steroids and Data in Brief. Congratulations to Bentley Hanish who was an undergraduate at the time of the work!