Betty Schwartz
Organizing Committee Member (NSFT - 2018)
Professor
The
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Israel
Professor Betty Schwartz, PhD from
Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel. From 1990 to 1993 postdoctoral
fellow at University of San-Francisco, California. From 1996 onwards she is
appointed as Professor at the Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science and
Nutrition at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. From 2005-2011 she
served as Head of the School of Nutritional Sciences. From 2003-2004 visiting scientist
at the Department of Cancer Biology, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX.
Research interests are focused on the anticarcinogenic and anti-inflammatory effects
of nutrients.
Cancer is one of the leading
causes of death in the Western world including Israel. Professor Schwartz has
searched numerous agents present in foods that can act as chemopreventive
agents and exert their activity on multiple signal transduction,
transcriptional regulation and activation of several apoptotic cascades in
various tumor cells and animal models of colorectal cancer or associated colon
cancer (induced by inflammation of the bowel).
Adipose tissue in obesity differs
from adipose tissue in lean subjects/animals.Â
Differences are evident in the immunogenic profile, body fat
distribution and metabolic profile. Adipose tissue in obesity releases free
fatty acids (FFAs), and many pro-inflammatory chemokines, factors known to play
a key role in regulating malignant transformation or cancer progression. Our
goal is to identify key molecular signals and interactions between adipocytes
and colon cancer cells that may foster the genesis and growth of the latter. We
aim finding crosstalk mechanisms connecting inflammatory pathways to
bioenergetic pathways. Linking both approaches may lead to a more complete
picture relating obesity to colorectal cancer. Additionally, we have recently
started to study the effect of ostreolysin, a fungal protein that can
specifically increase brown adipocyte differentiation and may be used as a
future drug for obesity. This molecule is also being tested as a putative
pro-apoptotic anticancer treatment.