43
Girard grad’s appetite for stomach research leads to breakthrough
GIRARD
You may not think about your stomach too much unless it reminds you it’s there, maybe, by rumbling when you’re hungry.
But for Kyle McCracken, a 2004 graduate of Girard High School who’s now a third-year student at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, it was a hunger for information that led him and a team of fellow researchers to focus on the stomach this past summer.
In a laboratory at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, McCracken was on his way to earning a doctorate in molecular and developmental biology. He and his team would craft a recipe for something special that no one had ever made before.
They would make it from scratch, using a very basic ingredient.
They grew whole, pea-sized stomachs in petri dishes from embryonic stem cells.
No one had ever successfully turned stem cells into stomach cells before, McCracken said recently in a phone interview.
“In general ... they’re very powerful. You can get them to become any tissue in the body, so that’s why people study them,” he said. “We had turned them into tissues from the GI tract — the intestines. We were the first ones to do that.”
That research was published in 2011, he said, and he was not directly involved with that project.
McCracken’s team guided their stem cells into stomach tissue by adding different chemicals and “signals,” he said.
“We try to recapitulate what would happen in the embryo in the dish,” he said. “After four or five weeks, it turns into a stomach.”
Those stomachs, McCracken said, will be important going forward in helping to understand how the organ works and how to fight diseases.
“They will be very useful for studying many different aspects of the stomach — how it works, how it secretes acids, normal function. And then, diseases, cancer, ulcers. It has the potential to be a powerful tool to study those things,” he said.
“We started to study how this one bacteria that is responsible for major cancers and ulcers causes changes in the stomach,” he said.
McCracken also said drug companies might use them to study how different drugs affect the stomach.
He said that in the more distant future, there is a potential use for transplants.
After completing the research, McCracken obtained his doctorate. He is now completing his MD at the school.
McCracken said there isn’t any person or event he can single out that made him want to study medicine.
“I was always interested in science. I was always interested in becoming a doctor,” he said.
He said he got a part-time job doing research in the lab at Cincinnati Children’s in college and became more interested in that area of the field as well.
He said he is still involved with the lab some, but he now mainly is concentrated on his medical work.
He did enjoy growing the stomachs.
“It was really cool!” he said.