KANG JIN JEONGGrowing up in a small village in India, “I was really passionate to know why things work,” recalls Pradeep Chaluvally-Raghavan. “Very silly and very basic questions” like: Why do plants grow? In college, his questions became more focused. “I wanted to study in a higher-resolution manner why living beings are growing and what kind of mechanism is regulating the growth of the cell,” Chaluvally-Raghavan says. “Then I was really interested to learn more about cancer, because cancer is a kind of unlimited growth.”
After obtaining undergraduate and master’s degrees in biology, he began his PhD work in the lab of Girija Kuttan at the Amala Cancer Research Center of the University of Calicut in India’s Kerala state. There, he began exploring the role of the NF-κB transcription factor and proinflammatory cytokines in the metastasis of melanoma using mouse models, screening for natural compounds that might help treat the cancer. He discovered, for example, that piperine, the molecule that gives black pepper its punch, inhibited metastasis in vitro.1
After earning his PhD, Chaluvally-Raghavan dove even deeper into cancer research in the lab of Yosef Yarden at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where he developed a 3-D cell culture model to study the HER2 oncogene, which is overexpressed ...
