Brid Ryan

In 2009, the penultimate year of her 4-year Cancer Prevention Fellowship, Dr. Brid Ryan was awarded the NCI Director's Innovation Award for her work on the relationship between single nucleotide polymorphisms in microRNA networks and the risk of lung cancer in Caucasian and African-American populations. Although her fellowship will end in 2010, Dr. Ryan plans to continue her work in the Laboratory of Human Carcinogenesis for an additional year. The Laboratory, under the direction of Dr. Curtis Harris, combines basic research and molecular epidemiology in a way that perfectly matches the fellow's interests.

Dr. Ryan's participation in cancer research began with her undergraduate work at the University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland, and continued during her doctoral studies at St. Vincent's University Hospital. As a graduate student with Professor Joe Duffy, she studied a protein called survivin as a prognostic marker in breast cancer. For Dr. Ryan, the translational aspects of that work emphasized the importance of understanding the clinical context even while engaging in very basic cancer research. She, therefore, considers her training in public health at University College Dublin during the first year of her Fellowship an invaluable part of her overall education.

"I don't imagine that I will be working as a public health professional in the future, but the fundamentals of the training I received have framed much of how I now view cancer research and how it relates to cancer prevention and care at a population level." This training, in part, inspired Dr. Ryan's decision to turn her attention to the risks associated with lung cancer in different populations at a molecular level.

In addition to her molecular epidemiology work, Brid is also conducting research on the identification and characterization of cancer stem cells in lung cancer. The cancer stem cell hypothesis states that special cells within a tumor are responsible for the initiation, maintenance, and progression of tumors. She is investigating whether these cells drive the development of lung cancer through a novel form of cell division that involves the co-segregation of template DNA. The results from this work will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in late January 20101.

Dr. Ryan attributes her initial attraction to the relatively young field of cancer stem cell research to a seminar given at the 2006 NCI Cancer Conference in Belfast, in which the NCI Director, Dr. John Niederhuber spoke about cancer stem cells. "It was a field I knew little to nothing about at the time, but it grabbed my attention and interest as a field of biology that I wanted to get involved in."

In addition to her full research agenda, Brid has been an active participant in the NCI community. She has leadership roles on several scientific and conference committees including Vice Chair of the Centre for Cancer Research's Fellows and Young Investigators Steering Committee and Co-Chair of the Cancer Prevention Fellow's Advisory Board. In 2009, Ryan also received a Fellows Award for Research Excellence and a Merit Award for Outstanding Performance as a Cancer Prevention Fellow.

"The Cancer Prevention Fellowship is a cross disciplinary program that provides its Fellows with a highly dynamic training experience that is enabling me to mature into an independent scientist. I am very grateful to the AICC and the HRB for their support. My experience at the NCI has surpassed what I thought it was going to be, and I have been blessed with a wonderful mentor, lab and friends," said Dr. Ryan.

¹ Pine, S.R., Ryan, B. M., Varticovksi, L., Robles, A.I., & Harris, C.C. (2010). Microenvironmental modulation of asymmetric cell division in human lung cancer cells. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0909390107.