3MT winner uses fruit flies to explore connection between obesity and cancer cell movement

Israel Wipf won this year's Three Minute Thesis competition, in which graduate students share their research in three minutes or less to a general audience

Friday, November 15, 2024

Israel Wipf wants to understand whether fat is a rich energy source that fuels cancer cells' movement. And he's using fruit flies to test the connection.

Wipf, a fourth-year graduate student in the University of Iowa Department of Biology, stitched together these seemingly disparate topics into a winning presentation at this year's Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, organized by the Graduate College. In the contest, graduate students from the humanities to the sciences share their research pursuits in three minutes or less to a general audience.

Wipf says he was humbled by being chosen the winner from a field of 13 contestants, whose presentations ranged from research into artists and performers in the impoverished community that lives along the Los Angeles River in California to the role of a persistent class of chemicals called PCBs on the human immune system.

"For me, the best part was sitting through the presentations and listening to so many great stories being told," he says.

Wipf is studying in the lab of Tina Tootle, professor and chair in the Department of Biology. He says how Tootle uses fruit fly genetics to address fundamental biomedical questions - including how cancer develops and metastasizes - was a major reason why he chose Iowa for graduate school, in addition to the university's location in the Midwest and proximity to Wipf's hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

For some time, scientists have hypothesized that cancer cells use fat as a fuel source for their movement, which is a critical step to metastasis. Further studies using cells in culture have shown the fat-cancer cell movement connection. But no one has tested the theory in a live organism.

Wipf is doing just that, with fruit flies, which have been used in science for more than a century to study basic biology, genetics, and the mechanisms of disease. In his research, Wipf examines what happens when cells in a fruit fly's ovary are deprived of lipid droplets - tiny fat sacs located inside cells.

"We found when we disrupt the cells' ability to use that stored fat in the lipid droplet, it disrupts their ability to migrate. So, now we're seeing it inside an organism. Those lipid droplets really, truly are important," Wipf says.

Wipf became interested in cancer through the painful experiences of witnessing a grandfather die from leukemia and an aunt succumb to breast cancer. On a pre-medicine academic track at the University of Sioux Falls, Wipf worked the summer after his freshman year as a patient care technician at a hospital in his hometown. During one shift, he visited with a woman whose nose had been removed due to her cancer.

"It was just sort of brutal to see the effects cancer can have on people's lives," Wipf says.

Wipf transferred to Vanderbilt University for his junior and senior years, after deciding he'd rather be involved in researching cancer than entering the medical field.

"I realized cancer is just biology gone wrong. We need to know more about the basic biology to understand and thus cure cancer and other diseases," he says.

Wipf completed a Bachelor of Science in biology at Vanderbilt before earning a master's degree in biology from the University of Northern Colorado.

Now in Tootle's lab, Wipf is trying to unspool when and why cancer cells choose fat, even though their first choice generally is sugar. One idea is that fat delivers more bang for the buck, and it may be more available in some instances.

That's where the obesity connection kicks in.

"There's evidence that if you have a cancer near a fat deposit, that cancer will start to steal that fat. It's called delipidation. You see that fat slowly go away as the cancer cells take it up. So that's one of the observations that lead us to believe cancer cells are using fat as fuel."

At the 3MT competition, Wipf, who was the final presenter, began his talk by acknowledging the seeming disconnect among cancer, obesity, and fruit flies. He ended it by paying tribute to the humble insects.

"The next time you're swatting at fruit flies in the kitchen," Wipf told the Iowa Memorial Union audience, "I hope what you remember is these little flies can be incredible tools to help us understand how cancer cells migrate, how to prevent metastasis, and, most importantly, how to save lives."