The UAB Department of Microbiology welcomed Gürkan Mollaoğlu, Ph.D., as an assistant professor in October 2024.

Mollaoğlu studied molecular biology and genetics as an undergraduate student at Istanbul University in Turkey and then completed his master’s degree in the same field at Koc University, also in Istanbul, Turkey. He earned his Ph.D. in oncological sciences from the University of Utah School of Medicine.

Mollaoğlu shares more about his professional background and what he is most excited for in this new role.

What inspired you to pursue a career in this field?

Mollaoğlu: Unfortunately, like many of us, my family was affected by cancer. My grandfather died of cancer when I was too young to understand. Later, I had a few other relatives, including an uncle, succumbed to death by cancer. Such sorrowful losses are constant reminders of why cancer research matters. Beyond this, I see cancer as an intriguing and amazing puzzle, which would not only save millions of lives but also decipher how life works once completed. The good news is that we do not need the whole puzzle to be completed to gain benefits of research as every piece coming together is saving many lives along the way.

Can you share your professional background and experiences prior to joining UAB?

Mollaoğlu: As a master’s student, I was working on understanding how cancer cell surface proteome reorganizes itself when the cells undergo division. This is important because mitosis (i.e., cell division) is how a single cell that becomes cancerous grows to become a tumor mass, and the cell surface is what the immune cells or a drug interacts with first when they come across the cancer cell. As a Ph.D. student, I worked at Trudy Oliver’s lab at Huntsman Cancer Institute, where I was interested in understanding tumor heterogeneity in lung cancer. During tumor development, cancer cells genetically diverge from their progeny and keep creating new variants to populate the same space. The product of this process is a heterogeneous tumor, where each cell or clone has its unique advantages and disadvantages. I identified several genes, whose protein products control the expression of many other genes in the genome to drive tumor heterogeneity in small-cell lung cancer in one project and non-small-cell lung cancer in another project. Importantly, these findings, alongside findings of other researchers in the field, helped us identify novel treatment strategies for lung cancer, which is, unfortunately, the deadliest cancer type.

After completing my Ph.D., I moved to New York to work at the laboratories of Miriam Merad, M.D., Ph.D., and Brian Brown, Ph.D., at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as a postdoctoral fellow. I was still interested in tumor heterogeneity, but this time my focus was to study how the immune microenvironment is regulated in this context. At this time, I met Alessia Baccarini, Ph.D., who introduced me to another cancer type, ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer affects so many women’s lives, and we still do not have a very effective treatment for the advanced-stage disease as tumors rapidly develop resistance to the currently available treatments. Unfortunately, immunotherapy also so far has failed for ovarian cancer. While we appreciated the causative relationship between tumor heterogeneity and resistance to treatments in ovarian cancer as in many other cancer types, we did not know as much about the molecular mechanisms. I identified a cellular communication mechanism between cancer cells and macrophages, a prevalent immune cell type in these tumors, which shaped the immune microenvironment to become resistant to immunotherapy. Importantly, I found that such cancer cell-immune cell communication mechanisms also explain how each tumor clone regulates its local immune niche while co-existing side by side with other clones to create heterogeneous tumors.

What is your primary area of expertise within your field, and what sparked your passion for it?

Mollaoğlu: I am particularly interested in studying the genetic mechanisms of tumor heterogeneity and its extension to the immune microenvironment. If a tumor was composed of one clone of cancer cells or had one type of microenvironment, it would be so much easier to treat and eliminate it. The heterogeneity is essentially what enables tumors to almost always have a chance to resist treatments. Taking advantage of recent breakthrough methods such as those of spatial biology and CRISPR, I am hoping that we will continue to decipher the underlying mechanisms of tumor heterogeneity and find ways to target them for better therapies, especially better immunotherapies.

What aspects of your new role here are you most excited about?

Mollaoğlu: While I was truly fortunate to have a great deal of flexibility in my research as a trainee, I always wanted to become an independent investigator and lead my research team. I am excited to help my future trainees and collaborators in pursuing the most interesting and pressing questions in cancer research. I believe the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Heersink School of Medicine at UAB will be the ideal place for me to realize my excitement for research into discoveries.

What are your goals for making an impact through both your teaching and patient care in this role?

Mollaoğlu: I am excited to teach the students about cancer, genetics, and immunology and hope to inspire many of the undergraduates to pursue a research career in cancer and other areas of biomedical sciences. In the lab, I wish to guide my future trainees to achieve their full potential in scientific research and enjoy many discoveries along the way.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Mollaoğlu: It is important to remember that science is by the people and for the people. Scientific progress, especially in the last 200 years, improved the human condition beyond any imagination. And all this progress is nothing but the cumulative achievements of so many scientists from all walks of life. What brought them together over time and space was simply their curiosity and anyone who is sufficiently curious of nature can contribute to the human triumph that we call “science”.