Manojit Swamynathan
I am interested in studying the influence of diet and metabolism in tumor progression and defended my thesis in 2024:
My Ph.D. thesis addressed a critical unanswered question in cancer: given the evidence that dietary anti-oxidants promote cancer, can pro-oxidants suppress tumor progression? Using RapidCaP, I demonstrated that dietary administration of the pro-oxidant vitamin K precursor menadione suppresses tumor progression. I discovered that the PI 3-Kinase VPS34 is a redox sensitive target of menadione. This evolutionarily conserved Kinase drives endosomal progression. I next showed that dietary menadione extends survival in a heritable genetic disorder that presents with excessive VPS34 kinase activity (Swamynathan et al. Science, 2024).
I found that RapidCaP cancer cells depend on the lipid chaperone FABP5. This has prompted me to further investigate this dependency and the enhanced sensitivity to FABP5 inhibitors (Swamynathan et al. Cancers, 2023).