Kip Guy. Photo by Elisabeth Fall.

First Appeared Thursday, 07 March '02

Revealing Subtleties of Cellular Interactions

Part of a series of profiles about the faculty and staff working to help shape the UCSF Mission Bay campus or who will be among its first pioneers in scientific discovery.

Kip Guy says he wasn't always interested in being a scientist. Of course, his parents have proof of an early interest in biology: a photo of a young Kip on his grandfather's farm in rural Tennessee poking a bug with a stick.

"It was backwards for me. I flirted with other fields as I grew up," says Guy, now an assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF.

A professed "military brat," Guy spent most of his childhood moving around. Therefore, he is not phased by the fact that he currently occupies two temporary homes: his lab on the Parnassus campus and his home on Treasure Island. "We've been there two years and I'm feeling kind of restless." The home he currently shares with wife, Caitlin, and two-year old son, Ciaran, will be torn down in two years to make way for 800 units of rental housing.

Though he may not know where he and his family will move next, Guy is already working on the upcoming move of his lab. That's because he has been among those planning the move to Mission Bay, serving on a few campus committees, including the user's subgroup and design committee. "It's been a pretty major time commitment on my part. But, I view it as my most important administrative effort." He says he is excited about seeing the new campus take shape. "I think it's a great thing."

The move to the new campus means Guy's lab will have a much easier time doing their work in synthetic chemistry. "We will be moving into the nicest chemistry lab on the West Coast." The kind of work Guy's lab does is similar to drug development going on in large, industrial settings. Larger facilities, he says, "will be essential to our long-term success."

Guy began his already successful career at Reed College in Portland, Oregon after graduating from high school in northern Mississippi. He majored in chemistry and was first exposed to industrial-sized chemistry while working in an IBM laboratory. Later, he earned his doctorate at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego where he studied organic synthesis. His postdoctoral fellowship was spent in the laboratory of Nobel laureates Mike Brown and Joe Goldstein at the Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas. He came to UCSF in 1998.

Despite his so far stellar career as a scientist, Guy admits he once considered a career in the military and actually began college focusing on comparative religious studies. He maintains current on these other interests by reading voraciously on both subjects. He recommends "The Cult of Saints," by Peter Brown for a perspective on the current world conflict. "The best fights are always between brothers."

Guy supplements his reading of religious, military and scientific history by devouring two to three novels a week. He also enjoys bicycle riding and wood working. When he's in the lab, Guy's work focuses on the study of cellular signaling. He approaches that work by producing large numbers of potential chemical inhibitors of protein interactions in signaling pathways. Of special interest are the pathways that involve estrogen receptors, thyroid hormone receptors and the regulation of the tumor suppressor gene, p53.

While these areas of research are crucial to the advancement of medical science, it's Guy's methods that set him apart. He is one of the first scientists to bring this large-scale technique, called parallel synthesis, into an American academic setting. "When we make a chemical in the library we make 184 or 96 at a time. It used to be that you did that one compound at a time."

Guy and the members of his lab use high throughput screening techniques to comb these libraries to reveal subtleties of cellular interactions. "The goal is understanding basic cellular function."

Guy's novel approach is useful to many scientists on campus, says Holly Ingraham a professor in the departments of physiology and obstetrics and gynecology. "There's nobody else here at UCSF doing this kind of thing. If we didn't have him to work with, we'd be in big trouble."

Ingraham and Guy are working together to determine the molecular structure of a protein that that binds to a receptor responsible for male sex determination. A mutation in the gene that codes for the receptor leads to an individual that is phenotypically female but genetically male, a condition called intersex syndrome.

Ingraham says that Guy's contribution is critical to her project as well as many others. And, she notes that he embodies the spirit of scientific collaboration. "He is a great resource and is always open to sharing his knowledge with others without asking: 'What's in it for me?'" Guy, for his part, says it is high time academia uses the advanced technology developed by the pharmaceutical research industry to further basic research. "It's highly automated and very powerful."

Source: Camille Mojica Rey