Dr. Marie Blanchette
Postdoctoral Fellow University of California, San Diego
PhD in Biomedical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, Université de Sherbrooke
When she was a child, Dr. Marie Blanchette used to dismantle her toys. Whenever they weren’t working correctly, she would take them apart, piece by piece, trying to deduce what was wrong so that she could fix them and put them back together. She was not often reinforced with success in these rescue endeavors, but pure curiosity was enough of a driving force to keep her doing it again and again. That intense drive to understand how the world works has led Marie to pursue a career in science. As she finishes up a postdoctoral fellowship, Marie is excited to start her own lab, digging deeper the better understand the blood-brain barrier’s role in health and disease.
Marie’s first scientific love was physics. In high school, she loved learning about the magnetic forces that are constantly at work around us. However, in thinking about her future, Marie felt strongly that she wanted a career geared towards improving others’ lives. She was thus drawn to the health sciences and got an undergraduate degree in pharmacology at Université de Sherbrooke in Québec.
In the end it was cancer research that led her to the brain. Marie unfortunately already knew cancer all too well, as it had claimed the lives of several of her extended family members. She wanted to be a part of the search for a cure, so when it came time to choose a summer research internship, Marie gravitated towards a cancer lab. Marie continued to work on cancer throughout graduate school, staying at Sherbrooke to do a PhD jointly advised by Drs. David Fortin, Martin Lepage, and Roger Lecomte. Her project involved designing and assessing strategies for sneaking cancer drugs across the blood-brain barrier to treat glioblastoma. While she no longer works on cancer, her graduate thesis introduced her to a new scientific love: the brain.
Marie’s reverence and awe for the brain are readily apparent. “It’s so magnificent,” she says, musing about how when you look at the brain, it gives no clue as to its incredible function. Bones are clearly for structure, the heart is obviously built to pump blood, yet the blob of folded fatty tissue that is the brain is remarkably unassuming. This mysterious aura of the brain, combined with her motivation to find a cure for deadly brain cancer, fueled Marie’s interest throughout her PhD work. In working on breaching the blood-brain barrier to deliver cancer drugs, she gained a new sense of respect for this specialization of blood vessels in the brain, recognizing that there was still so much unknown about the brain vasculature itself. She therefore sought a postdoctoral fellowship that would allow her to further explore the blood-brain barrier, a quest that brought her to the University of California, San Diego to work with Dr. Richard Daneman.
During her time as a postdoc, Marie discovered that the blood-brain barrier is quite different across different brain regions, and these regional specializations play an important role in brain function and behavior. Specifically, she found that a specific protein is expressed in the cells of the blood-brain barrier almost exclusively in the nucleus accumbens, and its presence there is necessary for spatial discrimination in mice. This finding has vast implications for the importance of the blood-brain barrier in healthy brain function: if just one protein at one region of the brain vasculature can affect behavior, how many more like it might there be? Marie has also worked on the blood-brain barrier in the context of Alzheimer’s disease, optimizing a method to isolate blood vessels from frozen human brain samples. This new protocol has allowed her to analyze differences between the blood vessels of Alzheimer’s patients and healthy adults in the hope of finding a new therapeutic target for the disease.
Marie is now excited to start her own lab and further probe the heterogeneity of the blood-brain barrier. She wants to understand whether regional differences in blood vessels might underlie specific brain regions’ vulnerability to neurodevelopmental or neurodegenerative disease. As head of her own lab, Marie hopes to continue the strong mentorship that is characteristic of her research family tree. She intends to model her mentorship style after that of her postdoc advisor Dr. Richard Daneman and his graduate advisor, Dr. Ben Barres. Both approached mentorship with the idea that a happy lab is a more productive lab, and that it is crucial to do everything possible to help mentees achieve their long-term scientific goals. Marie has already mentored several students throughout her career, which she believes has helped her grow as a scientist. She compares a mentorship relationship to symbiosis–both the mentor and mentee are learning and benefiting from each other.
Marie is planning to return to Canada for the next step of her career, eager to be back amongst the mountains, lakes, and woods that were the backdrop of her childhood. While she will miss benchwork a bit, she is looking forward to running her own lab. With a team of students and postdocs working with her, she will be able to do more of what she's loved ever since childhood: asking questions and seeking answers.
Check out Catie’s full interview with Marie on April 16, 2019 below!
