Member SpotlightsTracing Tumor Development Through Analytical Chemistry Techniques Ed Nice, LRIC A Member Since April 2002  Though residing in Australia, Ed Nice hails from England where he was educated at Dulwich College Preparatory School and Emanuel School, Wandsworth Common (which dates back to 1594) before attending Sir John Cass College, University of London. Professor Nice was awarded a LRIC (Licentiate of the Royal Institute of Chemistry) with an endorsement in Advanced Analytical from the Royal Society of Chemistry in London Chemistry where he is also a Fellow. He performed his thesis research, High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) analysis of steroid hormones, at the Chester Beatty Research Institute/Institute of Cancer Research in London focusing primarily on adrenal and testicular cancers.Professor Nice, or Ed as he prefers to be called, is currently a Principal Research Fellow at the Ludwig Institute in Melbourne, Australia and Associate Director of the CRC for Cellular Growth Factors. He is actually the longest serving practicing scientist (27 years) at the Ludwig Institute and has been on staff there since the foundation of the first branch at The Institute of Cancer Research in London. The largest of the Ludwig Institutes, the Melbourne branch is interested in tumor biology, especially epithelial cell cancers and in particular, colon cancer. The Institute's overarching objective is to translate new discoveries from the bench to the clinic. Applying his background in analytical chemistry, Ed has been able to develop methods for successfully purifying and analysing important biological compounds that are present in tissues and biological samples at trace levels. He has specifically used these techniques to probe biochemical pathways that may be involved in tumor development. During his early research in the 1970s, Ed investigated the ability of HPLC to separate complex mixtures of steroid hormones in order to study the abnormal pathways of steroidogenesis often present in endocrine tumors. At the time, this cutting-edge research lead to an investigation into the use of RP (reversed phase)-HPLC for the separation of complex mixtures of peptide and protein hormones -- the inappropriate production of which is associated with a number of tumour phenotypes. These studies demonstrated that protein and peptide retention could generally be correlated with hydrophobicity. This research resulted in a long-term collaboration with the HPLC manufacturer, Beckman/Altex, to produce novel short alkyl chain HPLC packings on large pore size silicas for the improved separation and recovery of proteins from RP-supports. Ed has always espoused that the ultimate purpose for understanding and developing new techniques is to apply them towards solving specific biological problems. Initially, he studied a number of tumor related peptides and proteins including ACTH, calcitonin, PTH, CRF and EGF. Since 1981 he has exploited the chromatographic methods developed to study the EGF/EGFR system, the hemopoietic CSFs and colonic growth factors. In particular, the lab purified sufficient murine EGF to permit the first NMR structure of this growth factor to be determined in collaboration with colleagues at Cornell University. Moreover, just recently the team he jointly heads at the CRC has solved the crystal structure of the TGFá/EGFR complex. In collaboration with other colleagues at the CRC, he has also purified a number of the hemopoetic colony stimulating factors including GM-CSF, G-CSF, M-CSF and LIF for N-terminal sequence analysis. These compounds have proven to have important pharmaceutical potential. To facilitate the subsequent recovery of protein samples in small volumes at high concentration, Ed has developed a series of techniques involving short microbore columns for the trace enrichment and separation of low (ng - µg) levels of proteins and peptides in high yield. The success of these specialized techniques has lead to their general acceptance as the method of choice for the purification of low abundance proteins and peptides for structural studies by sequencing laboratories worldwide. During a collaboration with Pharmacia in Uppsala, Sweden on the development of a novel micropreparative HPLC system (SMART), Ed became aware of the development of a new biosensor technology for studying protein-protein interactions in real time. He believed that this technology could be applied to many of the biological systems being studied at the Ludwig Institute. He began working closely with a research team at Biacore during the development of the technology and tested a prototype of this new biosensor instrument. In 1991, the first instrument of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere was installed in his laboratory in Melbourne. Ed recognized the complementarity between the biosensor technology and the micropreparative HPLC systems his lab had previously developed: HPLC may be used to purify and characterize reagents for the biosensor while the biosensor can be used to define chromatographic parameters for affinity chromatography or serve as an affinity detector for chromatographic fractions. The combination of these two powerful techniques has been used to search for orphan ligands both at the Ludwig Institute in Melbourne and the CRC for Cellular Growth Factors, as well as by a number of pharmaceutical companies. It has led to the identification of several new interesting biological systems, including the membrane associated antigen for the A33 monoclonal antibody, which is of clinical interest to the Institute. The use of several biosensor techniques based on alternative detection principals is a powerful way of probing biological pathways. His lab is currently also using a cell-based biosensor that measures extracellular acidification (Molecular Devices Cytosensor) in order to analyze inhibitors of the EGF/EGFR signal transduction pathways. This collection of studies forms part of the pre-clinical trails for a small molecule inhibitor the institute plans to enter into clinical trails this year in Melbourne for patients with glioblastoma. His lab is also examining the use of biosensors as microaffinity platforms for the micropreparative purification of novel binding partners and protein complexes for downstream proteomics analysis. Throughout his career, Ed has been very involved in organizing various scientific conferences. He is a founding member of the Australian Peptide Association (which organizes the Australian Peptide Conferences) where he is currently the vice president. In addition, he is the Conference Steward for the Lorne Cancer Conference. He is committed to promoting education and for several years was chair of the Education and Training committee for the CRC for Cellular Growth Factors. His lab has had a number of students, including overseas Master's students (from University of Uppsala, Sweden, University of Strasbourg, France and University of Mannheim, Germany) who do their industrial training in Melbourne. Despite the many hours he puts in at the lab, Ed still finds time to cycle, bush walk and swim. He enjoys cooking, wine tasting and listening to world music (especially Reggae, Blue Beat and Ska). He even used to be a keen Rugby player (prop forward) and motorcar racer, although that was when he was a tad bit younger! ### << Previous Next >> [ View All Member Spotlights ] |
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