Raquel Sitcheran

Biography

Dr. Raquel Sitcheran received her Bachelor of Arts in biology from Columbia University in 1992 and her PhD in physiology and genetics from the University of California, San Francisco in 2000 working with Dr. Keith Yamamoto. Her postdoctoral work was with Dr. Albert Baldwin at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She was a research associate at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at UNC Chapel Hill from 2006 to 2009 before joining the faculty at the Texas A&M College of Medicine in September 2009.

Research Interest

A key feature of all aggressive tumors, such as high-grade gliomas, is their ability to invade healthy tissue. Indeed, the infiltrative growth of cancer cells is a major impediment to efficacious treatment. We study the role of NF-κB regulatory proteins in regulating cancer cell behavior, particularly how they acquire motility and invasive potential. NF-κB is a ubiquitously expressed, evolutionarily conserved transcription factor that responds to a variety of signals and regulates fundamental processes, including cell growth and proliferation, inflammation, invasion and angiogenesis. Aberrant NF-κB activity or expression is associated with many cancers, as it can promote tumorigenesis, tumor progression and resistance to therapy. We are taking interdisciplinary approaches in cell imaging, in vitro 3-D invasion assays, biochemistry and animal models to study how different signals regulate NF-κBNF-κB and how de-regulation of the NF-κB pathway impacts cancer cell growth, self-renewal and survival. NF-κB-inducing kinase (NIK) is known to play an important role in immunity, and misregulation of NIK has been associated with many hematological and solid cancers. However, although NIK is expressed in the brain, its role in the CNS in general, and in brain tumors specifically, is poorly understood. My laboratory has established a critical role for NIK and noncanonical NF-κB signaling in promoting the migratory and invasive potential of glioma cells. More recently, we made the novel and intriguing observation that NIK is localized to mitochondria, which are important organelles for cellular energy production and survival. Current research efforts are focused on elucidating mediators of NIK signaling in the mitochondria in both cancer cells and normal, pluripotent cells to gain new insight into how mitochondrial dysfunction contributes to disease and cancer progression.