Associate Professor Rebecca Whelan Named May 2025 Sutton Family Research Impact Award Recipient

The Department of Chemistry congratulates Associate Professor Rebecca Whelan on receiving the May 2025 Sutton Family Research Impact Award!

The Sutton Award is a monthly competition among chemistry faculty. Every month, the Chemistry Department Chair and Associate Chairs review the peer-reviewed papers published by chemistry faculty from the three previous months to select a winner. The recipient receives a $500 cash prize and is featured on the departmental website.

For a full list of winners, visit our Sutton Family Research Impact Award webpage.

Mapping the Binding Sites of CA125-Specific Antibodies on a Revised Molecular Model of MUC16

By Chien-Wei Wang, Anubhuti Srivastava, Eliza K. Hanson, Caitlin McEntee, Trisha Nair, Jane C. March, and Rebecca J. Whelan

Published in Cancers, 2025, 17, 148. https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers17091458

The blood test for a protein called CA125 plays a crucial role in the care of ovarian cancer patients. Levels of CA125 indicate whether the cancer is responding to treatment (levels of CA125 go down when cancer is eradicated). CA125 levels are also followed in patients in remission to see if cancer is returning (levels of CA125 go up when cancer recurs). The CA125 test has major limitations, however, displaying rates of false-positive and false-negative response that make it unreliable for use in population-wide screening. (A false-positive response means that the test incorrectly reports that cancer is present, while a false-negative response means that the test fails to detect cancer when it is present.) Members of the Whelan research group at the University of Kansas have undertaken the challenge of understanding—at the molecular level—the origin of false-positive and false-negative responses in the CA125 test. This knowledge will enable our team and other researchers in the field to develop better blood tests for ovarian cancer, which may enable life-saving interventions by finding and treating cancer cases sooner.

In this study, members of the Whelan lab used small bacterial cells as protein factories, programming them to produce a small portion of the CA125 protein that could then be studied in detail. Each of these proteins was tested for how it would contribute to a signal in the CA125 test, by measuring how strongly it interacted with two specialized molecules (called antibodies) that form a sandwich around the protein. Surprisingly, the data reveal that one of the two antibodies used in the clinical test fails to recognize the cancer protein about 30% of the time. This new insight helps explain the problematically high false-negative rates of the CA125 test. With this knowledge in hand, the Whelan lab is now redesigning the CA125 test, using only antibodies that consistently bind to the protein, in hopes that such a test will provide a more reliable way to detect ovarian cancer, even at early stage.