When Sarah Asemota, MD, PhD, got notification that a paper on which she is the lead author would be published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), it marked her sixth publication in a prolific two-year period at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.
Sarah is a postdoctoral cancer researcher who graduated last year from the lab of Ramesh Narayanan, PhD. Her impressive publication record includes three PNAS papers, two Cell Reports papers, one iScience paper, and one review in Journal of Personalized Medicine. She has one more high-impact paper as first author in the pipeline.
“This outstanding publication record is a demonstration to her brilliance, dedication, hard work, and grit,” says Dr. Narayanan, associate professor in the College of Medicine’s Department of Medicine-Hematology. “We all are very proud of Sarah. This is also a testimony to the brilliant training environment UT Health Science Center is providing to our graduate students.”
Pathway to Cancer Research
Sarah’s journey into cancer research was deeply personal and driven by finding the right lab and mentor. “It was easy to visualize becoming a doctor because I have two aunts and an uncle who are all doctors,” she says. However, it was meeting Dr. Narayanan that sealed her path. “After going through multiple different labs with different PIs (principal investigators), I resonated most with Ramesh. We have very similar work styles, and very similar work ethics. I’m an early morning person. He’s an early morning person. We’ll work weekends. We’ll do whatever needs to be done in order to get projects out the door. He allowed me to run wild with my imagination, and rarely told me ‘no.’ He was not someone that ever said, ‘You can’t do these things.’”
One of Sarah’s most cherished projects involved triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), which disproportionately affects Black women. “Within that paper I talked a lot about how Black women are more affected by this breast cancer, and why the treatments that I suggested and researched within that paper could actually better help Black women with breast cancer. It just ended up being this wonderful thing that I would never take back for the world,” she says.
In one of her early papers as second author, she explored using androgen receptor agonists to treat breast cancer – a groundbreaking approach since most treatments use antagonists. “We typically use chemotherapy or radiation which kills everything or targeted treatments inhibiting receptors. But activating a receptor to inhibit cancer growth was novel.”
Addressing Resistance to Treatment
Sarah delved deeper into understanding resistance mechanisms. “Resistance is common in targeted cancer therapies, often causing recurrence or making the drugs ineffective over time. To test this, I treated mice with a drug that activates a receptor inhibiting cancer growth. Over time, the mice developed resistance to this treatment. This confirmed that resistance can occur with receptor-activating treatments as well. Next, I investigated why this resistance developed and how the cells changed after becoming resistant. Our lab has proprietary molecules that degrade androgen receptors, which proved essential for further research. The study revealed significant changes in cell morphology and genetic landscape from normal to cancerous to resistant states. Ultimately, I discovered another inhibitor using our proprietary molecules that effectively reduced the growth of resistant tumors.”
Future Aspirations
Sarah aims to specialize in surgical oncology while advocating for more MD/PhDs bridging clinical practice and scientific research. “There is a bridge that’s slowly being built but isn’t fully there yet between clinicians and scientists. If you’ve been in the clinic and doing research, you can ask questions and create solutions to problems that can actually be translatable. I think a major difficulty in translational science currently is the lack of people doing both. More people doing both can really start to bridge that gap between science that everyone sees.”
The paper, called “A Molecular Switch from Tumor Suppressor to Oncogene in ER+ve Breast Cancer: Role of Androgen Receptor, JAK-STAT and Lineage Plasticity,” was published September 23 in the latest issue of PNAS.