Annual Meeting

Engelking seeks to balance research and medicine

Ken Farabaugh
Jan. 19, 2023

When he was young, Luke Engelking’s mother asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. His answer? “’A mad scientist,’” he said.

Engelking certainly was exposed to the idea of a career in science and medicine early, as his mother pursued a second career as a physician’s assistant during his high school years. “Unfortunately, she had a number of rare autoimmune diseases and was often in and out of doctors’ offices,” Engelking said. “From then on, I always knew I wanted to go to med school. However, I wasn’t always certain that I wanted a Ph.D.”

Luke Engelking
Luke Engelking

Engelking ended up doing both. He went to medical school at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he got his M.D.–Ph.D. in the lab of Nobel laureates Michael Brown and Joe Goldstein, best known for their discovery of the low-density lipoprotein receptor and its regulation of cholesterol metabolism. He enjoyed working with Brown and Goldstein.

“It was a very productive time,” Engelking said. “I really didn’t appreciate working under their aegis when I was doing it. … Once you’re out on your own, everything is more of a struggle.”

Engelking has embraced that struggle. After a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and a clinical and research fellowship back at UT Southwestern, he not only began seeing patients as an attending physician but also opened his own research lab as an assistant professor in the departments of internal medicine and molecular genetics, studying the role of sterol receptor element-binding proteins in colon cancer growth and progression.

Now an associate professor, Engelking balances his time between seeing patients and conducting research. In addition, he is working to establish a clinical research program in colon cancer genetics so data on mutations of enrolled patients can be made publicly available to researchers at UT Southwestern and around the world.

“It’s my hope that we’ll be able to synergize the clinical work with the work going on in the lab,” he said. “It’s a challenge to try to get all of this work to align — I hope I’m making progress, but we’re not quite there yet.”

Identifying markers of cancer cell proliferation in the intestine

As a physician, Luke Engelking practices adult gastroenterology, focusing on patients with inherited mutations that lead to colorectal cancers as in Lynch and familial adenomatous polyposis, or FAP, syndromes.

In the Engelking lab, research focuses on the roles of lipids in intestinal epithelial cell growth. The lab uses Cre-lox and CRISPR tools to alter gene expression, RNA-seq and lipidomics to profile cell markers, and intestinal organoids from both humans and mice as model systems.

The researchers hope that discovering novel mechanisms by which sterol receptor element-binding proteins, or SREBPs, regulate tumor cell growth and proliferation will present new drug targets for the treatment of colon cancer. Recently, the lab demonstrated that selective loss of SREBP-2, which blocks cholesterol synthesis, leads to overgrowth and increased proliferation of intestinal progenitor cells.

“What I really hope to do is move toward patient-oriented studies,” Engelking said. “Perhaps we’ll find patients with FAP phenotypes but unknown genetic markers. There are any number of genetic unknowns that impact underlying cancer biology.”

Enjoy reading ASBMB Today?

Become a member to receive the print edition four times a year and the digital edition weekly.

Learn more
Ken Farabaugh

Ken Farabaugh is a former ASBMB science editor.

Related articles

From the journals: JLR
Caleigh Findley
From the journals: JLR
Carmen Morcelle
From the journals: JLR
Swarnali Roy
From the Journals: JLR
Sephra Rampersad
From the journals: JLR
Sephra Rampersad

Get the latest from ASBMB Today

Enter your email address, and we’ll send you a weekly email with recent articles, interviews and more.

Latest in People

People highlights or most popular articles

Guiding grocery carts to shape healthy habits
Award

Guiding grocery carts to shape healthy habits

Nov. 21, 2024

Robert “Nate” Helsley will receive the Walter A. Shaw Young Investigator in Lipid Research Award at the 2025 ASBMB Annual Meeting, April 12–15 in Chicago.

Leading the charge for gender equity
Award

Leading the charge for gender equity

Nov. 19, 2024

Nicole Woitowich will receive the ASBMB Emerging Leadership Award at the 2025 ASBMB Annual meeting, April 12–15 in Chicago.

Honors for de la Fuente, Mittag and De La Cruz
Member News

Honors for de la Fuente, Mittag and De La Cruz

Nov. 18, 2024

César de la Fuente receives the American Society of Microbiology’s Award for Early Career Basic Research. Tanja Mittag and Enrique M. De La Cruz are named fellows by the Biophysical Society.

In memoriam: Horst Schulz
In Memoriam

In memoriam: Horst Schulz

Nov. 18, 2024

He was a professor emeritus at City College of New York and at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan whose work concentrated on increasing our understanding of mitochondrial fatty acid metabolism and an ASBMB member since 1971.

Computational and biophysical approaches to disordered proteins
Award

Computational and biophysical approaches to disordered proteins

Nov. 14, 2024

Rohit Pappu will receive the 2025 DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences at the ASBMB Annual Meeting, April 12-15 in Chicago.

Join the pioneers of ferroptosis at cell death conference
In-person Conference

Join the pioneers of ferroptosis at cell death conference

Nov. 13, 2024

Meet Brent Stockwell, Xuejun Jiang and Jin Ye — the co-chairs of the ASBMB’s 2025 meeting on metabolic cross talk and biochemical homeostasis research.