Carla Rodriguez Tirado, a fourth-year Ph.D. student at UT Southwestern, has been honored with a William F. and Grace H. Kirkpatrick Award to support her research into metastatic prostate cancer.

Ms. Rodriguez Tirado’s work focuses on a gene that encodes an enzyme involved in degrading misfolded proteins in healthy cells and is found to be missing in 8% to 15% of prostate cancer patients. Intentionally deleting that gene from human prostate cancer cells using CRISPR gene editing technology makes the cancer more resistant to the current last-effort treatment for metastatic prostate cancer (cancer that has spread to other parts of the body), she found.

Her aim is to understand how and why deleting the gene allows prostate cancer to continue growing despite treatment with androgen receptor targeted therapies currently used in such patients with the long term goal of identifying new treatments for metastatic prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in American men. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 13 out of every 100 men in the U.S. will get prostate cancer at some point – and two to three of those men will die from it. Last year, prostate cancer resulted in more than 34,000 deaths, according to the American Cancer Association.

The Kirkpatrick Award provides $30,000 to support research proposed by a UTSW predoctoral student in an application for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Research Service Award fellowship grant. (As of today’s date, the NIH has yet to rule on Ms. Rodriguez Tirado's application.)

Funding provided by the Kirkpatrick Award will be helpful as Ms. Rodriguez Tirado continues her work in the lab of Ping Mu, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology. “It will support my research. It’s awesome that we get this extra support,” said the Kirkpatrick Award recipient.

“Carla is an outstanding cancer biology graduate student in the Molecular Biology Department and I have had the privilege of being her mentor for the last three years,” said Dr. Mu. “I am very impressed with her passion for scientific discovery, persistence to tackle challenging obstacles, comprehensive knowledge of cancer biology, and her willingness for productive collaboration.”

Ms. Rodriguez Tirado, who hopes to complete her doctorate in 2024, grew up in Puerto Rico and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology magna cum laude from the University of Puerto Rico. She participated in a summer program at UT Southwestern as an undergraduate student, researching lung cancer in the lab of Kathryn O’Donnell-Mendell, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Molecular Biology.

The Kirkpatrick Award winner said she became interested in studying cancer while taking an undergraduate cell biology class. “I was really interested in how cells work and how cancer cells work – how cancer cells take something that is put in place to keep healthy cells in check and use it to their advantage.”

Ms. Rodriguez Tirado’s project was chosen by the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences’ awards faculty committee from 17 eligible NIH grant applications of UTSW predoctoral students.