Current Projects in Women's Health

Leslie Crofford, director of the Center for the Advancement of Women’s Health, led the creation of the Kentucky Women’s Health Registry. This online survey will collect health information from female volunteers over the next 10 years to track health trends and serve as a recruitment tool for clinical trial participants.

“Why do some diseases affect women more than men? Why do women respond to some drugs and therapies differently than men? What environmental factors and behaviors most influence women’s health? We don’t know. But we want to find out. And we need the help of women of all ages and races across Kentucky,” Crofford says. Read more in Odyssey.

Tom Curry directs the Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) in Women’s Health. In September 2005, the COBRE grant was renewed for five years to a tune of $10.3 million—the largest single grant ever awarded to UK in the area of women’s health.

“The center really has two aims: first, to promote our understanding of gender-based differences and how they impact the heart and brain, and, second, to mentor young, junior faculty to become successful scientists,” says Curry, vice chair of research in the OB/GYN department. Read more in Odyssey.

Jeff Ferguson directs Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH), a program which began in 2000 and was awarded $2.5 million by the National Institute on Drug Abuse in September 2005.

Ferguson, chair of UK’s OB/GYN department, which ranks 15th in NIH funding to public medical schools, says the success of the renewal is a testament to the achievement of the BIRCWH scholars. These scholar-researchers brought in $7.7 million in extramural funding in the last five years. The program’s goal is to provide state-of-the-art training in women’s health to ensure scholars successfully establish research careers. Read more in Odyssey.

Michael Kilgore, who earned his Ph.D. from Texas Tech University, is an assistant professor in the department of molecular and biomedical pharmacology. He participated in the BIRCWH program and is now a member of the COBRE ovarian physiology team. His focus is peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR).

“PPAR is the target for a widely used class of diabetes drugs,” says Kilgore. “One of the things we see in obese diabetes patients is that they are often inovulatory for reasons that are not entirely clear. My COBRE project is trying to understand whether or not these drugs play a role in fertility, and if so can they be used to promote or inhibit fertility.”

PPAR also plays a role in breast cancer. “These receptors listen to hormones in the body—hormones like estrogen and dietary fatty acids. The National Cancer Institute is funding our study to look at whether dietary fatty acids increase or decrease the risk of breast cancer.” Preliminary data from a recent national study supports Kilgore’s hypothesis that PPAR activation reduces a woman’s risk for breast cancer.

“PPAR is a highly evolved target for drug intervention—meaning there are a lot of safe and effective drugs out there on the market already. So if we can prove they will work as an alternative method to reduce breast cancer risk or as adjunctive therapy for patients who have already had breast cancer—we can help women pretty quickly.” Kilgore’s breast cancer research is also supported by the Lexington Foundation Inc., a group that raises funds for cancer research. For more, visit http://www.uky.edu/~mwkilg0/.

Misung Jo, a native of South Korea who received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, is an assistant research professor in obstetrics and gynecology and a member of the COBRE ovarian physiology team. Her research focuses on ovulation (release of the egg) and formation of the corpus luteum (the mass of progesterone-producing cells that form once the egg has been released from the ovary). Ovulation is requisite for successful fertilization and corpus luteum formation is essential for maintaining pregnancy.

“Understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms of the ovulatory process will lead to better diagnostic evaluation and facilitate manipulation of these processes to either inhibit fertility, for contraception, or promote fertility,” says Jo. “This is especially important in today’s society where more women are delaying having children until later in life.”

Carol Jordan, director of the Center for Research on Violence Against Women, says, “The center’s mission is to advance research and graduate education on violence against women. What that means is we want to see state-of-the-art research move from the campus to the community—to the hands of the judge making a decision about probation for an offender, the therapist comforting a child, the doctor examining a patient, the police officer showing up at the scene of a domestic dispute. Because in a very real way what our UK faculty explore and discover can be lifesaving.” Read more in Odyssey.

Jane Joseph, who has been part of the COBRE team since 2001 and has grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, is an assistant professor in the anatomy and neurobiology department, but was trained as a psychologist. “My focus was cognition—perception, memory, language,” she explains. “During my postdoc training at Georgetown University, I got into functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.” Joseph is using fMRI for an innovative study of women’s cognitive function during a high-estrogen point and a low-estrogen point in their menstrual cycles. And the preliminary results are intriguing. Read more in Odyssey.

CheMyong (Jay) Ko, an assistant professor in UK’s College of Health Sciences, received a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue his research on the female reproductive system, looking at what occurs before, during and after ovulation, in order to pinpoint which genes cause ovarian cysts. Ovarian cysts affect over 10 percent of American women.

“If we can identify what portion of a cell plays a part in causing cysts, we can begin to understand why they occur and move one step closer to finding a solution.”

The NIH grant will help fund Ko’s research program at UK for the next five years and has allowed Ko to hire three new researchers, including a graduate student in computer science.

Under the mentorship of Tom Curry, professor and vice chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Ko and his research team are hoping their research leads to better understanding of the treatment of infertility. “Our goal is to establish the best model of mammalian ovulation,” Ko said,  “which will explain the roles of individual genes involved in the ovulatory process and help us in developing the best strategies to overcome infertility problems as well as designing safer contraceptives.” For more visit his laboratory website.

Edward Romond has been involved in clinical trials in cancer research since he came to the University of Kentucky 22 years ago. In 2005, the results of a massive, five-year breast-cancer trial focused on a drug called Herceptin were released, and the news was good for women with a particularly aggressive type of breast cancer—HER-2. Romond calls this "the single biggest advance in the treatment of breast cancer in decades." He adds that because of molecular biology and targeted therapies, the progress in breast cancer treatment in the next 10 years will be even much greater than in recent years. Read more in Odyssey.

Melinda Wilson, who earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology at Loyola University, says, “I came here from Chicago, eight years ago, to work with Phyllis Wise [a physiologist and the first COBRE director], looking at how estrogen protects the brain against stroke injury,” Wilson says. She spent three years as a postdoc and two years as a research associate in Wise’s lab.

Wilson still focuses on estrogen, but today she’s investigating how estrogen may protect the brain from HIV proteins, as well as the role estrogen plays in the cardiovascular system. She ventured into both of these areas because of research relationships fostered by COBRE. Read more in Odyssey.