Glioblastoma is an uncommon but deadly brain tumor that claimed the lives of Ted Kennedy, Beau Biden, and John McCain. In this disease, cellular pathways that maintain the specialization of brain cell types break down, leading to uncontrolled tumor growth.

With few options for treatment, glioblastoma is one of the deadliest brain cancers, and people diagnosed with the disease often succumb within a year. Now a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine hopes to demystify the molecular processes involved in the specialization of brain cells, in an effort to better understand what goes awry in glioblastoma.

Melanie Samuel was recruited to the Huffington Center on Aging from Harvard University where she was a postdoctoral fellow. She joined the Department of Neuroscience in 2015 with the help of a First-Time Tenure-Track Award from CPRIT.

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Glioblastoma is an uncommon but deadly brain tumor that claimed the lives of Ted Kennedy, Beau Biden, and John McCain. In this disease, cellular pathways that maintain the specialization of brain cell types break down, leading to uncontrolled tumor growth.

With few options for treatment, glioblastoma is one of the deadliest brain cancers, and people diagnosed with the disease often succumb within a year. Now a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine hopes to demystify the molecular processes involved in the specialization of brain cells, in an effort to better understand what goes awry in glioblastoma.

Melanie Samuel was recruited to the Huffington Center on Aging from Harvard University where she was a postdoctoral fellow. She joined the Department of Neuroscience in 2015 with the help of a First-Time Tenure-Track Award from CPRIT.

The brain contains billions of neurons and supportive glia of a wide variety of specialized types. Samuel says, “We know little about how those various types are generated or how they take on different identities.”

But one area of the brain has been extensively studied: the visual system. Because it’s easy to see how it’s organized, Samuel uses the visual system of mice as a model. She studies what happens when different genes are modified.

She’s particularly interested in a protein called LKB1, implicated in several different types of cancers. Based on her findings in mice, she thinks it may be involved in generating specialized cells that recruit blood vessels for supplying tumors and aiding their voracious growth.

Just as important as her research are the tools she’s developed along the way, for which she credits the unrestricted nature of CPRIT’s support. “We’ve been able to take calculated risks in developing new technologies and tools,” she says, “and these risks have paid off.”

Standard light microscopes are limited in the size of what they can resolve, or “see,” by the wavelength of light, 250 nanometers. Individual proteins and cellular processes are essentially invisible at this scale because they are too small to see. Scientists at MIT and elsewhere have developed nanoscopic imaging using blinking fluorescent-tagged proteins, which gets around this barrier and allows researchers to see individual proteins.

Samuel has bridged that technology from cell culture to tissue, building a new imaging approach to do so. “You need the whole tissue in order to study cancer,” she says. “We’ve developed a new method for visualizing proteins at a nanoscale inside the mouse nervous system.”

She also developed a new technology to find and sequence the DNA from extremely rare cells in a mixture of different types of cells. “Cancer can actually be seeded by individual cells that go haywire,” she says, “and if you can understand those changes on the level of the individual cell then maybe you can thwart its development.”

She says the CPRIT recruitment awards are one of the huge scientific strengths of Texas, which competes with other well-established research universities to attract high-caliber researchers. “CPRIT allows Texas to compete on a national and global scale, and the level of science I see around me is extremely impressive.”

CPRIT’s investment in Samuel has also paid off; since coming to Texas she has received $3.8 million in follow-on funding, from the National Institutes of Health, the Brain Research Foundation, and Ted Nash Long Life Foundation. She was also awarded the Nancy Chang Award for Research Excellence from Baylor.

Samuel received her undergraduate degrees in microbiology, molecular biology, and English from the University of Idaho, and her Ph.D. in microbiology from Washington University School of Medicine. She began her postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at Harvard in 2007.

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