Samantha Yee, a graduate student in the Physiology and Pharmacology discipline of the Integrated Biomedical Sciences program, has received the GSBS Travel Award for Fall 2019.

The GSBS Travel Awards supports travel to national scientific meetings for the presentation of their research. It is accepted three times each year (February 1, June 1, October 1).

Yee will be attending the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR): Turning Science into Lifesaving Care April 24-29, 2020 in San Diego. She is a third year student in Dr. April Risinger’s lab. She will be giving a poster presentation on “Efficacy of covalent microtubule stabilizers in drug resistant ovarian cancer models.”

“Attending AACR and presenting my research to the scientific community will enhance collaboration, provide insight to continually improve my experimental design, and provide novel perspectives on my current and future research goals,” she said. “The international conference exposes attendees to the latest discoveries across the spectrum of cancer research and attending the conference will allow me to interact with distinguished scientists and stay up to date with groundbreaking research in my field.”

Her research focuses on evaluating the pharmacological and physiological effects of a novel class of microtubule stabilizers, the taccalonolides, in both in vitro and in vivo cancer models, particularly ovarian cancer. The taccalonolides are natural products that have superior efficacy to clinically approved microtubule targeting agents in drug-resistant tumor models, as a result of its covalent interaction with tubulin that promotes distinct effects on the microtubule polymer. Ultimately, the goals of her work are 1) to identify an optimal taccalonolide for future clinical development and 2) elucidate the molecular and cell biological mechanisms underlying the antitumor efficacy of this novel class of drugs.