Sharks RX Spring 2015 Magazine

16 r NOVA SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY College of Pharmacy, Department of Pharma- ceutical Sciences. 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, at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, where she met geneticist Stephen Grant, who would later become her husband. The researchers spent several productive years on breast cancer research at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center before arriving at NSU’s College of Pharmacy in 2011. They sometimes work as a team, and their areas of expertise complement one another. “As a geneticist, I work on the damage to the genome that causes cancer, and Jean works on the mechanisms that repair it,” said Grant, Ph.D., associate professor of public health at NSU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. NSU’s College of Pharmacy 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. Additionally, South Florida has a more diverse population than Pittsburgh, offering more patients with an unusual kind of breast cancer called triple-negative. Those 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 targeted 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 Jean Latimer, top and opposite page, and her COP team often coordinate their research with other NSU researchers, including Jose Lopez (bottom, right), from NSU’s Oceanographic Center.