The winding, unassuming hallways of the Biology Building annex in the beautiful heart of Indiana University Bloomington lead to an unexpected find. Here, plain doors reveal a series of well-equipped labs — busy hubs of potentially lifesaving research unraveling the mechanisms cancer cells use to wreak havoc on the human body.
Relatively few people may know that Bloomington is a regional campus of the Indiana University School of Medicine, training physicians, educators and researchers, and launching new residency programs in internal medicine and emergency medicine this summer. Fewer still may be aware that IU School of Medicine—Bloomington faculty and students are working side-by-side every day in the Biology Building annex, conducting important cancer research as part of the Cell, Molecular and Cancer Biology graduate program. This year, the CMCB program is celebrating its milestone 10th anniversary.
The CMCB graduate program grew out of the existing IU School of Medicine—Bloomington anatomy, physiology and pharmacology graduate programs. Leading up to the creation of the CMCB program, IU School of Medicine—Bloomington, under the leadership of former associate deans Tal Bosin and John Watkins, expanded its research faculty and established an area of excellence in biomedical science with a strong focus in cancer biology.
“Given that one in every four deaths is caused by cancer, this change in direction from previous research in the traditional disciplines of anatomy, physiology and pharmacology was driven by a major biomedical problem,” said Claire Walczak, PhD, in her proposal for the creation of the CMCB program. Walczak’s lab focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying how cells preserve genome integrity and addresses fundamental questions about how cells maintain mitotic fidelity in both normal and tumor cell models.
With Walczak’s guidance, IU School of Medicine—Bloomington successfully designed and implemented the CMCB program in 2016. Walczak remarked that the new program provided “a way to focus research of our faculty and build a program that supports the development of scientists with foundational knowledge in cancer cell biology.”
Shruthi Sriramkumar, PhD, was CMCB’s first doctoral graduate, and her experience bridged the old and new graduate programs. In 2014, Sriramkumar came to the U.S. from Mumbai, India to pursue a one-year Master of Science in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Georgetown University. During that program, she worked in a lab that studied melanoma and became interested in cancer research. Sriramkumar applied to IU School of Medicine—Bloomington for her Anatomy and Cell Biology doctorate because she was interested in the labs conducting cancer research. She started that program in the fall of 2015 and transferred to the new CMCB doctoral program when it began in 2016. Sriramkumar received her PhD and graduated from the CMCB program in December 2021. She felt good about the transition from the Anatomy and Physiology program to the new CMCB program because the latter was structured more toward her interests in cancer research.
While a CMCB graduate student, Sriramkumar conducted research in the lab of Heather O’Hagan, PhD, current director of the CMCB graduate program. Research in O’Hagan’s lab focuses on non-genetic mechanisms driving cancer initiation, progression and therapy resistance. Sriramkumar’s PhD research focused on ovarian cancer, specifically on the role of platinum-mediated chromatin and metabolic alterations in ovarian cancer chemoresistance. Now pursuing a post doctorate at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Sriramkumar is studying epigenetic complexes that contribute to the enrichment of ovarian cancer stem cells, working to find targets that can be exploited therapeutically to delay disease recurrence and relapse.
Sriramkumar said she still communicates regularly with O’Hagan, especially when she feels stuck on a project. “I learned all of my skills at my time in the lab in CMCB,” she said. “I attended the maximum number of conferences and presented everywhere. Most of my professional achievements are because of my time in CMCB and Heather’s lab. I still miss it fondly.”
Since Sriramkumar finished the program in 2021, 12 other students have graduated and moved on to postdoctoral positions in academic labs or in industry positions in cancer cell biology. While the CMCB program has been pivotal in launching the careers of new cancer researchers, the students have also been a huge driving force in CMCB labs.
Richard Carpenter, PhD is a CMCB faculty member whose lab studies how cancer cells respond to stress. “CMCB faculty is a small group relative to other programs, but research is very well funded on a per-lab basis,” he said.
Among other sources, CMCB lab funding comes from the American Cancer Society, Colorectal Cancer Alliance, Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Stand Up to Cancer. Carpenter observed, this funding is a “direct reflection of the students” and the work being done.
“Labs in schools of medicine usually have mostly post docs,” O’Hagan added. “CMCB labs are staffed predominantly with grad students, which means they are the ones generating the data. Our research labs wouldn’t function without them.”
Students typically enter the CMCB program directly after completing their undergraduate degree. First-semester CMCB students rotate through different faculty labs. After choosing a lab that matches their research interests, they spend the next 1 ½ years figuring out their project and the process of learning to conduct experiments and generate data. Next, they take preliminary exams. Once past the preliminary exam, they go on to make discoveries, publish them, and earn their doctorate degree.
Carpenter said the goal of the program is that “students learn those skills in order to complete the research and make the discoveries.” While faculty members have been highly successful in garnering research grants, CMCB students have been equally successful presenting at conferences and getting travel awards. Around 10 CMCB students per year present posters at the annual Cancer Research Day at the IU Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center in Indianapolis, with many of them winning awards for their posters.
Due to the success of the CMCB program, Walczak was called upon to help design a similar program at the cancer center in Indianapolis. O’Hagan explained that the research at this new Translational Cancer Biology graduate program in Indianapolis is typically more clinically focused, while CMCB research in Bloomington is more mechanistic in focus and seeks to investigate areas such as why cancer cells proliferate, and why drugs work.
Sriramkumar said her most memorable times at CMCB were the annual trips to Cancer Research Day. She described these days as getting up very early and traveling together as a lab to Indianapolis. She recalled the experience as “a good way to catch up on what’s going on and a good opportunity to present our work.”
In looking back on the first 10 years of CMCB, Carpenter’s most memorable time was seeing “how students handled the pandemic and how they had to operate scientifically during that mess.”
“Students really had to show some perseverance,” he said. Carpenter described it as a very stressful time, with many restrictions and limitations, including how many people could be in a lab at any one time. Carpenter elaborated that during the pandemic, there were about 10-15 CMCB graduate students. Prospective students were not allowed in-person tours for a couple of years, so each lab had the unusual assignment of making a short, walk-though video to show prospective students.
Over the 10 years, what stands out to Walczak is “the combined success of our faculty in research publications, funding, recognition in their careers by outside societies, and the promotion of our faculty through the research ranks.”
Looking ahead, CMCB is bringing in a new assistant director of research and another junior faculty member. The hope is with new faculty, the program can grow and include more students as there will be more research spots to fill.
Another aspiration for the future is to acquire funding to offer more graduate student fellowships. IUSM—Bloomington currently awards two annual Doane and Eunice Dahl Wright Graduate Student Fellowships, providing a research stipend. Without fellowship support, grad students teach in order to receive a stipend, which can take away from research time.
Sriramkumar’s advice to current and future students is to enjoy their time at CMCB. “It is a great place to be and an amazing department,” she said. “You get to learn a lot, and eventually everything you learn helps in your work.”
