Post by Scripps Research

Congratulations to Zeba Rizvi, PhD, on receiving a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the American Cancer Society in recognition of her work to uncover how a key cancer drug target operates and why it sometimes stops working. Rizvi, a postdoctoral research associate in Andrew Ward’s lab, studies cereblon (CRBN), a protein central to treating certain forms of multiple myeloma and the primary target of immunomodulatory drugs (IMiDs). Building on work initiated in the lab of Gabriel Lander, she uses cryo-electron microscopy to examine how CRBN changes during drug binding and why some patients eventually stop responding to these therapies. “I hope that this work lays the groundwork for more deliberate, structure-guided drug design, helping move the field away from trial and error and toward therapies that can reach patients whose cancers no longer respond to existing treatment,” says Rizvi. More: https://ow.ly/itp550YHhMt