Welcome to Biomed Bites, a weekly feature that introduces readers to some of Stanford's most innovative researchers.
In her family, Daria Mochly-Rosen, PhD, is the odd woman out: One parent and four of her siblings are architects.
But as the George D. Smith Professor in Translational Medicine at Stanford, Mochly-Rosen brings her family's focus on space and design to her work as a biomedical researcher. "I’m looking at the cell as a physical space as a room or a building where things need to touch each other in certain ways," Mochly-Rosen says in the video above.
She applies this lens of the world to address several basic research questions, including learning about how cells deal with stress. For a cell, stress isn't a bad day at work or a rough commute home. Instead, its prolonged exposure to chemicals or physical forces that build up and impair cellular function.
In healthy cells, there are "lots of little machines" that reduce the stress, Mochly-Rosen said. In her lab, researchers work to enhance the efficacy of these built-in destressors and to capitalize on the cell's existing machinery. She says:
We are really interested in finding ways to boost them up and to increase their activity so we can deal better with stresses that are associated with disease or even with simple aging.
And what we do there is we try to find small molecules — in other words, drugs — that will boost the system.
For example, Mochly-Rosen and her team have discovered a molecule that helps with the negative effects of alcohol and alcohol-related cancers.
Learn more about Stanford Medicine’s Biomedical Innovation Initiative and about other faculty leaders who are driving biomedical innovation here.
Previously: Why drug development is time consuming and expensive (hint: it's hard), New painkiller could tackle pain, without risk of addiction and Stanford researchers show how hijacking an enzyme could help reduce cancer risk
