Armed with PhD, researcher hopes to continue fight against cancer

As a high school student in Essex, Carly Griffin never imagined the extract from a rare plant native to Hawaii would lead her to an eight-year post-secondary academic journey and arm her with a wealth of knowledge that might one day provide a potential cure against the disease that claimed the life of her father.

Dr. Griffin successfully defended her PhD in biochemistry in January 2011, and although she still has some family members asking what kind of medicine she’ll practice, she’s patiently explaining that she’s not that kind of doctor while weighing her options regarding where her career in cancer research will take her next.

“I feel really good about the research we’ve done to this point,” said Griffin, who focused much of her efforts on pancratistatin, a natural compound from a Hawaiian spider lily plant which has shown promising results in killing commercially available cancer cells. “There are still a lot of unanswered questions, but wherever I go, I’m still going to be very interested in this project.”

Griffin, whose father passed away in 2000 at the age of 47 after a battle with colon cancer, recently published an articleregarding pancratistatin in the academic journal Molecular Cancer Therapeuticswhich described how the substance killed colorectal carcinoma cell lines. In fact, during her time here, she published 14 journal articles and two book chapters. Her thesis, she said, was an amalgamation of those publications.

“That’s a pretty remarkable achievement for a PhD student,” said biochemistryprofessor Siyaram Pandey, Griffin’s academic supervisor. “I have not seen a thesis that’s so complete, that started basically from scratch and was taken almost to the pre-clinical work. That doesn’t happen very often. We’re so proud of her.”

Besides all her lab work, Griffin also worked with local clinicians and pathologists, which gave her a more complete picture of the implications of her research. In one study she worked on with Caroline Hamm, an oncologist at the Windsor Regional Cancer Centre,she collected blood samples from leukemia patients to test the effectiveness of the substance on them. Her last paper was dedicated to those patients.

“It was heartbreaking to see them, but we explained our work to them and they were all very happy and willing to contribute even if they knew that it might not help them,” said Griffin, who was helped along the way with an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, as well as awards from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Griffin was invited to make presentations for post doctoral fellowships at the British Columbia Cancer Agency, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Researchand Princess Margaret Hospital,affiliated with University of Toronto, but is still undecided about where she’ll go.