Horizons Fall 2013

10 HORIZONS Growing up in Waterbury, Connecti- cut, Jean JohannaLatimer , Ph.D., thought she wanted to be a scientist, or maybe a journalist. Then a friend in her grammar school class was diagnosed with leukemia and later died from the disease. Witnessing her friend’s illness worsen over four years made Latimer want to go into research to help end such suffering, she said. “I realized where I should put my energies,” said Latimer, an associate professor in NSU’s College of Pharmacy. So, instead of being an investigative journalist, she is investigating ways to defeat cancer at the molecular level. She uses her writing skills for medical manuscripts and persuasive grant appli- cations seeking continued funding for her work. After earning a B.A. in Cellular Biology from Cornell University, she received her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the State University of New York—Buffalo, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, where she met geneticist Stephen Grant, who would later become her husband. When he moved to California to take a job at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, she did postdoctoral work at the Laboratory of Radiobiology and Environmental Health at the University of California—San Francisco. They were married in Lake Tahoe. After several productive years of breast cancer research at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, they arrived at Nova Southeastern University’s College of Pharmacy in 2011. They sometimes work on the same team, and their areas of expertise complement one another, Grant said. “As a geneticist, I work on the damage to the genome that causes cancer, and Jean works on the mechanisms that repair it,” he said. NSU was a perfect fit for several reasons, Latimer said. The recession was shrinking research efforts in the Northeast, while NSU’s research program was growing; also she loves teaching and is able to do that here. Addition- ally, South Florida has a more diverse population than Pittsburgh, offering more patients with an unusual kind of breast cancer called “triple negative.” These tumors are more aggressive and don’t respond to the most effective therapies currently available, she said. “For many decades, we treated breast cancer as if it were all one disease. Now we know there are at least seven types. Triple-negative is intrinsically more aggressive, and it is also the type for which we have the fewest treatments,” she said. Of the nearly 200,000 new breast cancer cases each year, about 85 percent arise sporadically, while only about 15 percent occur because of a genetic predisposition, Latimer said. About 40 percent of breast cancer cases in African American women are triple negative, and only about 17 percent in European white women, mostly descendants of Ashkenazi Jews. “Jean can do what no one else can do,” Grant said. “She can grow cells from the human body almost every time.” Her lab has about 150 breast tissue cell lines she created, including normal tissue derived from women who had breast reduction surgeries, and some tumor lines including 13 triple-negative tumors from European white and African American patients, with the goal to use these cultures for drug development and discovery. “We’re interested in racial diversity specifically in breast cancer, in ancestral groups, and we have a novel model NSU Researchers Work to Defeat Cancer BY NANCY MCVICAR Jean Latimer, and her husband, Stephen Grant, often work on the same research team. Their areas of expertise complement one another.