Moving back up the checkpoint pathway, researchers including Piwnica-Worms learned that a protein called Cdc25C regulates Cdc2. Over the next several years, she made important discoveries about how the two proteins interact. She reported some of these findings in the journal Science in 1997, pinpointing a molecule that binds to Cdc25C and inhibits its interaction with Cdc2. This indicated that Cdc25C is essential to the checkpoint pathway. This approach should make cancer cells divide into defective cells that quickly die.
Clinical trials are currently under way.
Piwnica-Worms met her husband, David, when she was 16, after her family relocated to Minneapolis. They went to his senior prom together, but he left for Stanford University soon after. D. program while she pursued a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology. Degrees completed, they spent 10 years in Boston, with mixed feelings. It was ideal for their careers, Piwnica-Worms said, but she didn't like living in a place where traffic drowns out the singing of birds.