Freezing Cancer: How Cryo-EM is advancing oncology research

Science with a Twist

⚡ Cryo-EM is a powerful tool that helps look at cancer molecules differently. Penn State University uses the cryo-EM technique to understand and outsmart cancer. Professor Kelly explains, "Our lab uses a very high-tech imaging approach. It's called cryo-electron microscopy or cryo-EM, which pioneers in our field actually won the Nobel Prize for just a few years ago. And what we'd like to do is dive deep into cancer cells, understand what molecules look like using these instruments, take pictures and snapshots of them — what you would do with your iPhone but in portrait mode — so we can really focus very deeply on the nuances of these molecules. Then we use these molecules to try and better understand what goes wrong in cancer, how these molecules are to cancer, and what we might do to better inform treatments based on differences in molecules from cancer cells versus normal cells."

⚡ Cryo-electron microscopy allows us to image things at the level of atoms. So what makes cryo-EM technology so useful in cancer research? Professor Kelly says, "What cryo-EM does is it allows us to see all the molecules that constitute cells, their different placements within cells, as well as their over architecture down at the level of atoms. So going even deeper beyond just the level of cells, we can get down and understand the level of which proteins are with DNA, how these proteins don't interact with DNA properly to protect cells from diseases, or how things might work against us when cells become cancerous and how molecules go awry and don't perform their job properly."

⚡ What makes Penn State unique in cryo-EM? Professor Kelly explains what makes her lab's cryo-EM one of a kind. She says, "Cryo-electron microscopes that are installed and operational at Penn State are uniquely built to service the life science community as well as the material science community. And some of these instruments have different analytical tools and cameras integrated in them that you wouldn't find in any other cryo-EM instrument. We're looking to screen and look at proteins differently."