Endocrine Abstracts

Nancy Carrasco, Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, NY, USA Abstract

Dr. Nancy Carrasco was born in Mexico City. She obtained her Medical Doctor and Masters in Biochemistry degrees from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Dr. Carrasco was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Kaback at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology in New Jersey, U.S.A., where she performed structure/function studies on the lactose permease of E.coli. She is presently a Professor in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Dr. Carrasco is the author or co-author of dozens of publications in major international journals. Her groundbreaking publication ‘Cloning and characterization of the thyroid iodide transporter’ (Nature, 1996) represents one of the most significant advances in thyroid research in the last few decades. Since then, Dr. Carrasco has been the leading expert on the Na⁺/I^- symporter (NIS), the plasma membrane protein that mediates active I^- transport in the thyroid, mammary gland, and other tissues. She has carried out a detailed characterization of NIS and its regulation, and extensively studied the pathophysiological applications of NIS. Another key publication, ‘The sodium iodide symporter (NIS) is expressed in mammary gland during lactation and in breast cancer’ (Nature Medicine, 2000), raises, for the first time, the possibility of applying NIS-mediated radioiodide transport in the diagnosis and treatment of human breast cancer.