Welcome. I’m your host, Jess Wisse. On today’s episode we’ll talking about how scientists are taking a new approach to better understand and fight cancer. Stay tuned to learn more.   JW: New research published in Cellshows a never-before look the steps that happen when a woman develops endometrial cancer. This type of cancer affects the uterine lining and it can be deadly. PNNL researchers are using their expertise in mass spectrometry and cancer biology to better target this disease. Meet one of them: Karin RodlandKR: I’m Karin Rodland. I am a PNNL laboratory fellow and I'm one of the lead cancer biologists at PNNL. The main thing that I do is provide expertise about cancer biology to the mass spectrometry group that does proteomics and metabolomics measurements of lots of different tumors.As I got into my 30s and I started really doing this, it's like got my PhD and I thought “Where am I going to postdoc? And what am I going to do in my own research lab?” The number of people I knew who were friends who had cancer—it was just mind-boggling. And I would go to Lions Clubs and Rotary Clubs to do this kind of lay outreach and I would start by saying, “If you or someone you know has had cancer raise your hand.” And every single arm in the room would go up. That's why I do this.JW: Karin has studied cancer biology since the 80s and she’s one of the top experts in the field. KR: KR: I ended up at Oregon Health & Science University as an assistant professor in the mid 80s and I was there for 17 years. And I earned the right to go on sabbatical and I came to Pacific Northwest National Lab to learn proteomics because they were the world's best at proteomics and I thought I was going to need that technology for my research. And I came on sabbatical for a year and I really enjoyed the team research philosophy and culture that they do at PNNL. I was totally impressed with the mass spectrometry technologies and the computational biology expertise and I saw a great opportunity to apply all these capabilities to biomedical research and particularly to cancer.JW: For years doctors and scientists have known that cancer is a genetic disease. Our genes control much of what happens in our bodies, including the way our cells function, grow, and divide. Because of this, cancer researchers have spent a lot of time studying the DNA and RNA of cancer cells. But Karin and her team looked one step closer. They studied the proteins synthesized by these cells. KR: What we call the central dogma of molecular biology, is you have the genes and they're the blueprint. And they send out kind of a Xerox copy and that's the messenger RNA. And then the message gets made into proteins and the proteins actually do the work. And the way that they do the work is by being modified with phosphorylation which turns them on and off, or by acetylation which opens them up or closes them down. So it's easy to measure DNA and it's easy to measure RNA. The technology has been very well developed, it's inexpensive, and it's easy. So scientists and doctors measure what is easy and convenient to measure. So we can measure genes and that's the only tool that most doctors have for doing precision medicine. It's the genes and maybe they can do the RNA. And so all these models have been built up trying to predict disease outcome based on the genes and the RNA. What we found is that when you add the proteins you get much, much more information. And sometimes the information from the RNA is a little bit misleading. It's a little bit different than the information that you get from the proteins, but if we correlate the proteins with the known clinical features we find that the protein modifications are more powerful in this study.JW: In this most recent study, Karin and her team studied nearly 150 uterine tissue samples. And they did so by using a tool called a mass spectrometer. This is an incredibly sensitive instrument that can measure the smallest parts of a sample. Us