Sophion research grant awardee Dr. Ĺžerife Yerlikaya is conducting important research in our Copenhagen lab

Dr. Şerife Yerlikaya’s research grant was awarded to study chemotherapy drugs on Nav1.7 currents, furthering her studies on sodium channels and cancer using Sophion’s automated patch clamp platforms.

Dr. Ĺžerife Yerlikaya, an assistant professor from Istanbul Medipol University, is now in our Copenhagen labs to work alongside senior research scientist Dr. Kim Boddum.

We sat down with Ĺžerife to discuss her research and aims whilst in Copenhagen.

Can you give a brief summary of what you’ll work on in Sophion’s labs?

We have aimed to understand the effect of platinum-based chemotherapy drugs on Nav1.7, which is known to be highly expressed in non-small cell and small cell lung cancer types, by using Sophion’s high throughput automated patch clamp technologies.

What was the impetus that first got you into this area of ion channel research?

It is really an interesting curiosity for me. Honestly, I can say, it started during my PhD thesis when I was working on the effects of combinations of drugs on apoptosis (programmed cell death) in breast cancer cells. I realized one of the sleep-inducing compounds caused an apoptotic mechanism and decreased the metastatic ability of triple-negative breast cancer cells with limited toxicity. Then I started to wonder about the mechanism behind the effects of sleep-inducing compounds and cancer metastasis. This curiosity took me towards trying to understand the mechanism behind cancer metastasis and traditional chemotherapy by a “neuroscience” approach – meaning I started to study ion transporting proteins. This led me to think about bioelectricity and cancer!

Any surprises or unexpected findings that struck you whilst doing your research?

I had an unexpected finding while doing my post-doctoral project in Will Brackenbury’s lab at the University of York in the UK. We were working on paclitaxel chemotherapy drugs, which can have side effects including: neuropathy, fevers, and can even be fatal, for patients at high concentrations. We had found 500 pM of paclitaxel (picomolar is a tiny concentration to do an experiment on cancer cells), decreased both transient and persistent sodium currents in triple-negative breast cancer cells. Then we started to think about repurposing chemotherapy drugs, which could be potentially more effective on cancer patients with non-toxic concentrations. From these observations, I came up with future project ideas to improve existing therapeutics.

Were there key challenges that you managed to overcome or techniques that needed mastering?

The first key challenge for me was to learn how to work with manual patch clamp (it can still bring tears to my eyes when I remember those early months). It was a big step for me to dedicate myself completely to learning how to use this complicated technique! Any patch clamp electrophysiologist knows very well that you have to manage a lot of things at the same time (vibrations, holding positive pressure, air bubbles inside the pipettes, challenges to have a good seal, etc.). And it can make you crazy when someone walks around you during recordings! I literally wanted the world to stop during my recordings. With manual patch clamping there are a lot of problems, but I was lucky enough to be on the right rig with the right people around me at the Brackenbury lab.

My second key challenge was to master perfusion during electrophysiology experiments. When I observed that assay for the first time, I thought “It will be crazy to see the effects of the drugs on sodium currents using patch clamp” This is interesting because you have to wash the cells with the drug without physically changing your sodium current recording after getting a seal and going whole-cell! At times it felt like a fine line between breaking my spirit and breaking the cell!!

So, the manual patch challenges took me to new ideas, methods, and projects where automated patch clamp would help my research:

  1. Overcoming sealing challenges and getting high-quality recordings
  2. Eliminating working with time-consuming protocols
  3. Doing rapid drug efficiency tests
  4. Determining immediate therapeutic strategies for metastatic cancer types
  5. Speeding up chemotherapy drug repurposing for cancer patients
    (an ultimate aim for my ongoing research).

Where do you see your lab’s work going in the next few years?

I would like to focus my work on automated patch clamp technologies to improve and advance existing problems in the field of ion channel research. For this purpose, I would also like to design and create innovative, new applications and assays.

Welcome to Sophion Ĺžerife, and we wish you all the best in your research grant work.

Learn more about Dr. Şerife Yerlikaya’s work on sodium channels & cancer:

View Dr. Yerlikaya's recent poster’s here
Read more on VGSC & cancer here