Faculty Spotlight: Shalini Sharma, PhD

Shalini Sharma, PhD, has been known to say that one of her favorite parts about being a faculty member at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix is the opportunity she gets to impact the lives of the next generation of biomedical researchers.

Sharma, an assistant professor in the Department of Basic Medical Sciences, said that she enjoys mentoring and working with a broad array of individuals, from high schoolers to undergraduates, medical students and postdoctoral researchers.

She has been especially instrumental in the success of the department’s High School Research Internship program, which over the past two summers has enticed Phoenix-area youth to learn more about the possibility of pursuing careers in biomedical research. She was a founding director of the program and remains part of its committee.

“We’re looking forward to recruiting even more mentors and students next year, and I am really excited about that,” Sharma said.

Like many researchers, her interest in medical research stems from personal experience. Sharma has memories of her family suffering from hematopoietic (occurring in blood-forming tissues) cancers and other diseases when she was growing up.

That personal connection, coupled with a love of research, led Sharma to pursue undergraduate degrees in biochemistry and microbiology, as well as a doctorate from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Her post-doctoral research was completed at the University of California, Los Angeles and dealt with regulation of pre-mRNA splicing, an area she continues to research at the College.

“I’m interested in understanding mechanisms that regulate gene expression using splicing as a regulatory mechanism,” she explained.

All protein-encoding genes have non-coding segments called introns, which must be removed, a process that occurs during mRNA transcription, with the help of a molecular machine called a spliceosome.

Sharma explained that the accuracy and fidelity of the mechanism that splices mRNA is very important when it comes to examining normal gene expression and understanding regulation of gene expressions in general.

“We know that when misregulation occurs during the splicing process, there is disease,” she said.

It is estimated that up to 60 percent of human disease-causing mutations disrupt splicing elements in pre-mRNAs, leading to formation of abnormal mRNAs. Conditions linked to errors in pre-mRNA splicing include autoimmune disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, cystic fibrosis, growth hormone deficiency, muscular dystrophy and cancer progression.

The disease Sharma studies, in particular, is myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) — a group of diverse bone marrow disorders, in which the bone marrow does not produce enough healthy blood cells. In healthy people, bone marrow makes blood stem cells — also called immature cells — which become mature blood cells over time. With MDS, these stem cells may not mature and may accumulate in the bone marrow or have a shortened life span, resulting in fewer than normal mature blood cells in circulation, which can lead to infection and anemia.

While her passion for biomedical research never wavers, Sharma did not hesitate to admit that the slow pace of progress, repetition and monotonous nature of the research process can be the source of much frustration. She said that whenever those feelings creep up, she circles back to the time she spends every summer with those high school students and remembers why she’s in this business in the first place — to inspire others and encourage them to follow their passion, just like she did.

“It has been a great experience,” she added. “Just the other day, a high school student that I mentored last summer during the internship program called me and wanted to talk about his future plans. That’s what really makes me excited about being here and being part of this institution.”