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In 1999 Eng was recruited to lead the human genetics division of Ohio State University’s internal medicine department. “And in retrospect, the PTEN gene is vital for human development.” That’s why when it mutates it not only gives rise to cancers but is associated with autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder.

“And so it must be a very important gene not only for cancer development” but for normal development as well. “I said ‘Oh boy, these lumps and bumps, they seem to affect every layer of the germ cells,’” she recalls. Professor Michael Blackstone, “a man so smart he frightens chairmen of medicine,” taught her the complexities of tumor-causing syndromes. Her father had to return to Singapore after two and a half years, but she managed to stay in the United States by dropping out of Lab early and starting in the College at age 16. She enrolled in the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where she caught the genetics bug from biology teacher Murray Hozinsky. When she was a teen, Eng’s family moved to the United States so her father, Soo Peck Eng, PhD’72, could work on his doctorate. “There’s none of ‘Oh, the regular doctor’s not here.’ Horrible things happen on weekends.” She did the same as an internal medicine physician and oncologist. Sitting at a round table in her office, amid a smattering of gifts from colleagues over the years-glass animal figurines and pillows embroidered with goofy sayings-Eng says she learned the importance of connecting with patients from growing up around her “number one uncle,” the personal physician of the founding prime minister of Singapore. … They couldn’t get their heads around that.” Her first funder was the American Cancer Society (she’s an ACS professor now) and then others came around. The National Institutes of Health “kept saying ‘Where’s your mouse model?’ I don’t care. Translational medicine is an interdisciplinary approach to research where findings in the lab don’t exist in a vacuum but are closely linked with clinical observation and improving patient care. “As Funmi Olopade herself said, I was a translational investigator before the word ‘translation’ came into being,” she says. “So the moment you find a PTEN mutation, we start screening the thyroid.”īack in the bargain-wine days of her career, Eng had a tough time landing research funding. “With our recent 2012 study, the youngest age of thyroid cancer is six years old,” says Eng. For instance, thyroid cancer tends to show up in PTEN patients at a much younger age than in the general population.

Later she and her research team found that patients with the PTEN mutation and an epigenetic alteration called KILLIN have even higher cancer risks.Įng’s findings have led to early screening for Cowden patients who carry the PTEN or KILLIN mutations. In the 1990s Eng discovered the first PTEN gene mutation associated with Cowden. But I’m like, I’m in the middle of my work!”Īn effervescent presence in the church-like halls of Lerner Research Institute, Eng has made a name for herself with her discoveries of several key genetic links to Cowden syndrome, a disease characterized by the spread of benign tumors.Ĭowden patients with the PTEN mutation have much higher incidences of colon, thyroid, and breast cancers. Unfortunately, they tasted on Mondays at 10 a.m. After one year, they said, ‘Boy, you’re so good we want to invite you to the wine committee.’ That’s the committee that picks wines for the college.

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“The old boys wouldn’t even collaborate with me if I didn’t know my wine.” So she began reading Wine Spectator and going to free wine tastings at local shops on Saturdays. In England the drinking culture was huge, she says. Postdoc work at the University of Cambridge, where Eng was the lone woman in a sea of men, spawned her interest in the grape. I said, ‘If we drank a bottle every time we published a paper, we’d be drunk all the time.’” Eventually, confesses Eng, “we published so many papers that I stopped this. Rouge Homme 1985, an elusive claret, was poured in honor of findings on RET, another tumor-related gene. “We were poor then,” says Eng, the chair and founding director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Genomic Medicine Institute, with a twinkle behind her silver-rimmed glasses. The budget-minded Seaview Brut and Roeder Estate hark back to the late 1990s, when Eng and her colleagues at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute toasted her discoveries around PTEN, a gene linked to a tumor-causing disease called Cowden syndrome. Some people have trophies geneticist Charis Eng, AB’82, PhD’86, MD’88, has empty wine bottles arranged on a high shelf in her office at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute.