Nancy Carrasco
Vanderbilt University
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Primary Section: 23, Physiology and Pharmacology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2015)
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Biosketch
Nancy Carrasco is the Joe C. Davis Professor in, and the Chair of, the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, having previously been on the faculty at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1987 to 2011 and at the Yale School of Medicine from 2011 to 2019. Dr. Carrasco, an internationally recognized leader in the study of membrane transporters, was the first scientist to clone and extensively characterize the sodium/iodide symporter (NIS), the key plasma membrane protein that mediates active iodide transport in the thyroid and other tissues. Dr. Carrasco's pioneering contributions have had a great impact on the fields of NIS structure/function and regulation, membrane transporters, molecular endocrinology, gene transfer, diagnostic imaging, cancer therapy, and public health. Dr. Carrasco received her MD and Master's in Biochemistry from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in her native Mexico City. She was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Ronald Kaback's laboratory at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology. She has received numerous national and international awards, has been president of the Society of Latin American Biophysicists, and is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
Research Interests
Nancy Carrasco's main area of interest is transport across biological membranes, particularly by the sodium/iodide symporter (NIS), the key plasma membrane protein that mediates active iodide uptake in the thyroid. Carrasco's group cloned NIS and has made great strides in characterizing it at the molecular level. NIS is at the center of the treatment for thyroid cancer based on administering radioiodide post-thyroidectomy, the most effective targeted internal radiation cancer therapy ever devised. Carrasco's group has discovered that functional NIS is endogenously expressed in breast cancer, opening up the possibility that this disease too could be treated with radioiodide. Carrasco's group has investigated the function and regulation of NIS in extrathyroidal tissues and in cancer to extend the clinical use of NIS beyond thyroid disease. They have obtained key structure/function information on NIS and identified amino acid residues that play crucial roles in substrate binding, translocation, specificity, and stoichiometry, and in targeting NIS to the cell surface. They are currently using these findings to optimize NIS molecules for use as reporter and therapeutic molecules in gene transfer studies. Carrasco's group has demonstrated that NIS transports different anion substrates with different stoichiometries, and is working to elucidate the structural basis for this versatility. They have also shown that NIS actively transports the anion perchlorate, an environmental pollutant. This suggests that the health effects of exposure to perchlorate are more serious than previously thought.
