Reza Dastvan, Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, is advancing scientists' understanding of the molecular mechanisms of cancer.
, came to the Saint Louis University School of Medicine to start his lab in December 2019, as COVID-19 started to reshape the world.
“I was lucky enough to set up my lab just before the pandemic, and then the pandemic hit,” the associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BMB) said. “So that was, I could say, a very stressful time in my career.”
With few colleagues around to help guide him through the challenging process of establishing a lab, Dastvan struggled. But you wouldn’t know it from all that the young researcher has accomplished in just four years.
Dastvan has secured two major grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and in July 2023, he received early tenure and promotion from SLU, becoming one of the youngest tenured faculty members at the University.
“I'm really honored that NIH actually recognized the innovative nature of our research,” Dastvan said. “And I appreciate the trust and support that I received from our department chair, Dr. Enrico Di Cera, my colleagues in the department, as well as the University administration.”
Metastatic cancer is Dastvan’s core research focus, and he is building a collaborative network that extends beyond the SLU School of Medicine to characterize the still-mysterious molecular mechanisms that allow cancer cells to spread throughout the body and wreak havoc. Specifically, Dastvan studies the low-oxygen — or hypoxic — conditions that commonly accompany metastatic cells and seeks to understand the structure and function of several components of the molecular pathways that enable these cells to survive and thrive in the stressful condition of oxygen and energy starvation. Because hypoxia is also a feature of other deadly conditions like stroke and metabolic diseases, understanding the underlying mechanisms involved in metastatic cancer could inform a suite of therapeutic approaches.
In July 2023, together with researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, Weill Cornell Medicine, and the University of Copenhagen, Dastvan received up to seven years of research funding via a prestigious Method to Extend Research in Time (MERIT) Award from the National Cancer Institute. This grant — also called an R37 Award — will fund Dastvan and his collaborators as they try to identify, using a variety of cutting-edge microscopy and spectroscopy methods, the unknown mechanisms that cancer cells use to secrete enzymes called kinases that help them survive and proliferate.
“So in the history of SLU, we had only three of these grants,” Dastvan said. “All of them were awarded to faculty at BMB, and two of them were about 30 years ago. We are honored to receive this grant.”
His other grant, an R01 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, will help Dastvan and collaborators at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign to interrogate the functional mechanisms of membrane transporters associated with metastatic cell survival, as well as their bacterial homologs.
Dastvan said that he hopes to translate his success in the early stages of his academic career to help for human patients. “If you can basically inhibit those membrane transporters or the release of the kinases, it provides new therapeutic avenues to target these cancer conditions.”
Story by Bob Grant, executive director of communications, research.
This piece was written for the 2023 SLU Research Institute Annual Impact Report. The Impact Report is printed each spring to share the successes of our researchers from the previous year and share the story of SLU's rise as a preeminent Jesuit research university. More information can be found here.