gary weisman

#IAmScience Kimberly Jasmer

September 20, 2019 By Mariah Cox in #IAmScience Tags: gary weisman, Michael Petris

By Mariah Cox | Bond LSC

#IAmScience because I get to spend the rest of my career being curious and creative, answering challenging questions, and making my small contribution to our collective body of knowledge.

What does competitive swimming and cancer research have in common? For Kimberly Jasmer, the intense world of competitive swimming has guided her towards obtaining her Ph.D. and studying cancer at the University of Missouri.

Learning to swim was imperative for a girl growing up on the coast in North Bend, Oregon, and she fell in love with the water. That love led to a competitive swimming career that began at the age of nine and continued for 16 years, through the third year of her Ph.D. program at MU.

But Jasmer was set on conducting cancer research since high school after her grandmother contracted breast cancer twice throughout her life.

While an undergraduate at the University of Washington in Seattle, Jasmer visited MU for a swim meet. The trip also presented her with the opportunity to speak with Steve Alexander from the Division of Biological Sciences.

“I came out here for a swim meet and set up an appointment with Dr. Alexander and he was very confused why this random swimmer from Washington wanted to meet with him. We ended up having a really great conversation and I applied to graduate school here,” said Jasmer. “Mizzou provided me the ability to do the research I was interested in and also continue my swimming career and it was one of the few places that I could do both of those things.”

Now, 10 years later after starting her program at MU, Jasmer has earned her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences and is three years into her post-doc in the Petris and Weisman labs.

During her time at MU, her research has evolved, but it always ties back to cancer research in some way. For her Ph.D., Jasmer studied a specific enzyme, Heme oxygenase 1, in the body that has the capability to promote tumor growth including melanoma if overproduced.

“Heme oxygenase 1 is considered a protective enzyme but too much can promote cancer,” said Jasmer. “You need enough to protect yourself from DNA damage caused by oxidative stress but not so much that it can lead to other unintended consequences, such as melanoma.”

After, she began her post-doc in the Weisman lab researching Sjögren’s syndrome — an autoimmune disease affecting the salivary and lacrimal glands ability to produce saliva and tears that carries with it an increased risk of developing lymphoma — she has honed in on looking for drugs that inhibit inflammation in the salivary glands to improve saliva flow and minimize the risk of lymphoma development.

Looking to the future, Jasmer has applied for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant that would extend her post-doc for one to two years and provide funding for the first three years of a faculty position. The grant would allow Jasmer to begin her own research on finding a radioprotective therapy, which would shield patients with head and neck cancers from the unintended consequences of radiotherapy. This research is connected to her current work on Sjögren’s syndrome because radiation can cause the inability to salivate and produce tears.

This research hits close to home because her uncle suffered from a tumor in his nasal cavity. The radiation he received caused him to lose the ability to produce tears and taste most foods. “I’ve seen the effects of radiation firsthand, and it’s hard for him that he can’t taste anything anymore,” Jasmer said.

Jasmer’s focus and intensity extends to all the goals throughout her life. In her swimming career, Jasmer made it to the national championships and qualified as an All-American for three years swimming at the college level. Additionally, she qualified for the 2008 and 2012 Olympic trials in Omaha, Nebraska.

Although she didn’t qualify for the Olympic team in 2008, she was determined to make a comeback in 2012. Before the 2012 trials, she tore her labrum but was able to recover within a year and qualified again. While not making it past the trials for the second time, Jasmer was proud of all she was able to accomplish within her swimming career.

After her second round at the Olympic trials, she decided to take a step back from swimming. After her time on the MU swim team, she hadn’t returned to the Mizzou swim deck since 2012 until last week.

“Before, swimming reminded me of the disappointment because my career hadn’t turned out as I planned,” said Jasmer. “Now it takes me back to the happy enjoyment of being in the water. When I went swimming last week, it reminded me of what I loved, which is being in the water.”

Now, as a mom, Jasmer hopes her daughter finds passion in an activity as much as she found in swimming.

“I took her to mommy-and-me swim lessons this past spring. I want her to know how to swim and be safe, but I don’t know that I care if she swims or not,” said Jasmer. “My parents had no knowledge of swimming and I think it was fun for them to learn a completely whole new world. So, if she decides that she wants to do an activity that I know nothing about, I just hope she finds something that she’s passionate about.”

Aside from swimming and research, Jasmer serves as the chair of the MU post-doc association board.

“I’m passionate about helping other people develop their own transferable skills they’ll need for their career because it’s easy to just end up doing research and not develop the rest of the skill set needed,” said Jasmer.

She also loves exercising through CrossFit and lifting weights as well as spending her time outdoors, hiking, camping and going on float trips with her friends. She has even taken her daughter Sofie hiking with her in Whistler.

The Curious Case of Inflammation: One Lab’s Mission to Put the Pieces Together

May 11, 2015 By Paige Blankenbuehler in Research 13 Comments Tags: biochemistry, Bond LSC, gary weisman, inflammation, jean camden, laurie erb, lucas woods, weisman

White coat, dark room. Jean Camden, a senior technician in the Weisman lab, reviews salivary gland and brain tissue samples for research on inflammation. | Photo by Paige Blankenbuehler, Bond LSC

By Paige Blankenbuehler | MU Bond Life Sciences Center

There’s a criminal on the loose, striking every day. Millions fall victim, but there’s still no way to stop it. And, in all likelihood, you have been hurt by it.

If inflammation is an unsolved criminal case of the last three decades, then Gary Weisman has been the detective. He’s certain there’s an accomplice — perhaps many — that may be triggering the discomfort.

The Bond Life Sciences Center investigator is slowly revealing what makes inflammation tick and what makes it strike. Each epiphany brings another question. He’s certain there’s a way to prevent negative effects of unsolved inflammation.

Bond LSC investigator and MU professor of biochemistry, has been studying the ins-and-outs of inflammation for the last 30 years. | Photo by Paige Blankenbuehler, Bond LSC

Weisman has dedicated his career to understanding the micro-processes behind inflammation. He’s become so specialized that his techniques can be as hard to crack as the case itself.

“I would not ask anyone to explain what I do,” Weisman says. Nonetheless, he’s been able to divide the process of inflammation into two categories: components that repair the body and components that lead to its destruction. This will help find inflammation’s many accomplices to figure out why humans work, and what their bodies do when they don’t work so well.

“I am interested in the meaning of life,” Weisman says. “Life has become simpler for me because the scientific method carries everywhere. I’ve become aware of how simple we are as a machine.”

Criminal or just misunderstood?

Most criminals adopt patterns, but inflammation stands as a signpost for mysterious, underlying problems.

Its effects are usually localized: an arm, a joint, the brain or a gland. You feel a temperature spike then the skin reddens in a part of your body. Later still, the skin tightens and pain comes at a snail’s pace.

Not even cells are safe. Inflammation even strikes on the molecular level.

But really, inflammation can be a good thing. It’s part of the immune system’s bag of tricks to signal the body to bring in reinforcements to fight off the invasion. Normally, inflammation corrects a physical problem, but if it is not successful in repairing a problem, inflammation can become chronic and accelerate tissue destruction.

Just like in an episode of CSI, Weisman puts the pieces of the inflammation puzzle together in his office by applying the expertise of Laurie Erb, Jean Camden and Lucas Woods — all donned in white lab coats, eyes pressed to the microscope examining evidence and building molecular evidence in the case.

The MU associate professor of biochemistry and his team have become a sort of grant-wielding wizards to sustain his pursuit of inflammation triggers. National Institutes of Health grant awards have sustained his lab for decades. The funding has come from varied sources such as the MU Food for the 21^st Century Program, the Bond LSC, the Bright Focus Foundation, the American Heart Association and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. In recent years, research funding for Alzheimer’s disease and Sjogren’s syndrome (a disease of the salivary gland that causes dryness) have contributed, too.

But the funding source doesn’t matter because inflammation is the tie that binds.

Jean Camden processes samples under the Weisman lab's microscope. | Photo by Paige Blankenbuehler, Bond LSC — Jean Camden processes samples under the Weisman lab’s microscope. | Photo by Paige Blankenbuehler, Bond LSC

Advancements, like recent mapping of the human genome, have moved his work forward to understand inflammation’s complexity. Each experiment he completes fills in another blank slate in the “human owner’s manual.”

“As humans, we’re so intent on the fact that we’re superior to all, but really we’re not,” Weisman says. “With the Human Genome project, we’ve come to understand that all living things have similar designs … we are on the verge of finding revolutionary solutions to preventing or reversing human diseases.”

A receptor all our own

One specific player in the body’s immune system has kept Weisman’s attention for most of his career. The P2Y2 protein is a nucleotide receptor, and his lab team members affectionately refer to it as “our receptor.”

Nucleotide receptors are regulatory molecules in red blood cells. What they regulate is nuanced, mostly undetermined and of great interest to scientists. Answering that question has become Weisman’s wheelhouse.

The body manufactures 15 different types of nucleotide receptors, all similar in construction, but each are believed to have subtly different functional roles. It’s as if Weisman and his lab is on the case of a highly organized crime ring.

“Our receptor is mainly present when inflammation occurs, and we’re trying to figure out its role in a variety of diseases,” Weisman says.

The P2Y2 receptor has been observed in Alzheimer’s patients, along with a plaque build-up in the brain, and the receptor was suspected of playing a role in the disease’s progression.

Weisman and his colleagues found that the deletion of the P2Y2 receptor in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease accelerates progression of plaque build-up, neurological symptoms and death. This suggests that the receptor has anti-inflammatory effects rather than being “guilty by association” with the tissue-destructive aspects of inflammation.

“It’s like I have this 30,000-piece jigsaw puzzle in front of me that I have to put together,” Weisman says. “What’s the difference between you and me? As a machine, surprisingly very little.”

This simplicity drives Weisman to continue solving the mysteries of inflammation and search for its underlying chemical processes. By understanding the body’s chemical reactions, he believes treatments can be developed to focus the immune system on repairing damaged tissues.

Through studying his receptor, Weisman is breaking up inflammation’s crime ring.