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Dr. Erdem Tabdanov is Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Penn State College of Medicine and also a Member of the Penn State Cancer Institute. He received his bachelor’s degree in biotechnology and his MSc in chemistry and molecular and cellular biotechnology from Lomonosov Moscow State Academy of Fine Chemical Technology (MITHT). He was awarded his PhD in cancer research from L’Institut Curie in Paris. Afterwards, Erdem conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. He then served in the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. army for four years. Erdem completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota before joining the faculty at Penn State where he is today. In this interview, Erdem shares more about his life and science.
People Behind the Science Podcast Show Notes
Life Outside of Science (2:51)
Some of Erdem’s hobbies outside of science include working out at the gym, calligraphy, sketching, digital art, and other visual arts. He is also considering adopting a cat. His interest in digital art emerged from his desire to put the story of his research together in compelling figures and schematics for scientific journal articles.
The Scientific Side (7:10)
Erdem works in the field of mechanobiology where he studies the mechanical and structural aspects of cells. He wants to better understand how cells physically move, sense their environments, and accomplish their various functions. This is very relevant to cancer biology because cancer cells can move to different parts of the body to form new tumors in healthy tissues. In addition, the cells of the immune system are highly motile. They cover long differences and travel through dense, solid tissues to find and address threats to our health.
A Dose of Motivation (13:17)
How do you get better at something? Do more of it.
What Got You Hooked on Science? (17:45)
When he was twelve years old, Erdem became fascinated with the symmetry and asymmetry present within our bodies. For example, our limbs are mirrored on the left and right, but some organs form on one side but not the other. He wanted to know how cells in the developing embryo establish this asymmetry. Erdem’s early interests were in mathematics, but after reading the literature to try to shed light on the asymmetry issue, he discovered the science of biology. Realizing that cells weren’t the static bubbles depicted in textbooks was transformative. Erdem became particularly interested in the cytoskeleton of cells because it is a highly dynamic component of the cell that determines how the cell physically and mechanically does what it does. These interests attracted him to biology, but Erdem knew that he needed a strong theoretical background from fields like physics, math, mechanics, and chemistry, so he decided to pursue an engineering degree in college. From there he continued to follow his interests as his scientific career unfolded.
The Low Points: Failures and Challenges (33:35)
During his PhD, Erdem was assigned a project with the goal of transforming a certain cancer cell line into neuron-like cells. His advisors believed that if these cells were transfected with the receptors from neuronal cells, they would become more neuron-like. After working on this project for a year and a half, Erdem hadn’t made much progress. Not only was he not seeing evidence of a transformation in the cancer cells, but he couldn’t even get the plasmid encoding the gene of interest into the cells. Instead of continuing to try the same failing experiments over and over, hoping that it would somehow work, Erdem decided he had to make a change. He managed to convince his advisor that it wasn’t going to work, and Erdem was able to pivot to a more fruitful project that he proposed. Stepping away from this initial project was definitely the right decision for his career.
A Shining Success! (36:59)
One of the exciting projects Erdem is working on now focuses on the ameboid motility and self-segmentation of our immune cells. How they accomplish these movements is still not well understood. Erdem discovered that septin proteins are important for this self-segmentation process and other functions that are key for migrating cells. This has important implications for cancer treatments because it is physically difficult for immune cells to get inside of dense solid tumors to break them down. Understanding how immune cells move can help these cells penetrate into tumors. This project has the potential to have major impacts, and it was really exciting because Erdem accurately predicted the outcomes for multiple steps of the experiments over the course of an entire year. Everything worked as expected, and this is a highly unusual course of events in science. This was Eredem’s series of Eureka moments.
Book Recommendations (40:17)
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, books by Carl Sagan.
Most Treasured Travel (42:52)
A destination that Erdem particularly enjoyed was Leipzig in Germany. This small city has an incredibly rich history. The composers and musicians Felix Mendelssohn and Johann Sebastian Bach both worked there, and it is the place where the play Faust was written. Visitors can actually go to the places described in Faust and experience them firsthand. The city also has an interesting mixture of architecture, and there are multiple layers to explore. Erdem likes seeing the sites and facets of cities that aren’t the usual tourist stops advertised on postcards.
Quirky Traditions and Funny Memories (45:47)
People may not realize that many scientists are superstitious. Erdem has known people who have particular rituals or unusual steps they take before starting an experiment in the hopes of increasing the likelihood of success. One example of this type of behavior is wearing a particular pair of lucky shoes every time there is an important experiment to be done. Coming from a predominantly military family, Erdem was surprised to see highly logical people engaging in these practices and also having a spiritual side. It’s not uncommon for scientists to be interested in spirituality, the human mind, yoga, meditation, the supernatural, etc. Scientists have varied interests, just like people in other professions.
Advice For Us All (50:18)
People who get to the point where they can call themselves successful possess one important quality: grit. You have to cultivate this grit and the ability to keep getting up and doing things that aren’t easy. Grit is an important part of your personality that is essential for achieving great things. Also, don’t try to solve problems alone. Always seek second opinions.
Guest Bio
Erdem’s lab is focused on the principles of cell collective behavior and 3-D motility, governed by cytoskeletal machinery and cell organelles mechanics, unified into an active, heterogeneous, composite “smart” decision-making gel. Work in the lab focuses on the cytoskeleton, which features a hierarchical multi-tier organization and extreme mechanostructural adaptiveness. This allows the cytoskeleton to integrate external and internal mechanical, structural, and biochemical signals into a single spatiotemporal pattern of cell behaviors and responsiveness modes, currently studied as isolated phenomena (e.g., mechanosensing). The lab’s mission is to build a more integrated biophysical model of cell behavior that will be more biologically and medically relevant than other paradigms. Erdem’s lab is particularly interested in the principles of 3-D motility of immune and cancer cells to better optimize immunological treatment strategies for cancer. Since immune cell 3-D motility remains largely undeciphered, the lab is developing and testing the biophysical models of T-cell motility as a balance and/or a superposition of various modes of cell motility, which also cross-integrate multiple components of the T-cell cytoskeleton, as well as the overall T-cell architecture and T-cell organelles’ mechanical and structural contribution. Solid tumors represent a mechanosteric challenge for immune cell infiltration, thus remaining largely unavailable for targeting by the immune system. To address this, the lab is developing a strategy to increase CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell motility in the mechanostructurally aggressive biomimetic and/or native tumor microenvironments to achieve a better intratumoral T-cell infiltration. This strategy is based on the pharmacological control, as well as genetic modifications, of cytoskeletal signaling that shift and adjust various modes of T-cell cytoskeletal dynamics to customize and improve T-cell infiltration capabilities in various microenvironments.
Support for this episode of People Behind the Science was provided by New England Biolabs, Inc.