When he was a practicing dentist, Dayo [pronounced DYE-oh] Oluwadara enjoyed having people "come to your dental chair with pain and troubles, and like a miracle, they would leave happy." As he nears completion of a PhD in cellular and molecular pathology, Dayo sees his cancer research through the lens of that experience: "What I do on the bench could impact people at the bedside," he says; he might help to discover a treatment "that could bring joy to patients in the hospital."

His work on a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme, has the potential to do that. Dayo is part of Dr. Paul Mischel's laboratory, where researchers are attempting to understand the molecular and genetic mechanisms that drive cancer with the goal of developing targeted therapies for its treatment. Dayo has pursued two projects in this research area.

First, he's looking at the signaling pathways at the cellular level. "Imagine that there are two or three telephones coming into your house," Dayo says, "and one of the phones keeps ringing and doesn't stop." The ringing telephone would be like the cancer cell, stimulated to excessive activity. Problems at any point along the pathway could cause cancer. "Subtle differences here and there will be germane to the type of drug used for treating" the cancer, he explains. In effect, the drug might block the doorway into the cell—scientists would call that a receptor inhibitor—or stop the cancer somewhere else along its path to the cell's nucleus.

Dayo's other project examines biomarkers, genes that have a significant role in brain cancer. "I'm looking at the profile at the protein levels, and I'm studying some tissue samples to be able to see how these proteins can be useful in terms of prognosis, diagnosis, and therapeutic intervention," Dayo says. That research will form his dissertation.

Professor Mischel says that "coming as a dentist who wanted to train in science" makes Dayo quite unusual. "He's dedicated and diligent, and he's working hard to develop this skill set and take it back to help patients with oral cancers," Professor Mischel says. Perhaps surprisingly to the lay person, "the genetic mechanisms that cancer uses seem to be quite similar independent of location," he explains, so that "a person with a brain cancer and another with a throat cancer may have more in common than two patients with brain cancer." As a result, Dayo's plan "makes perfect sense."

The first post-PhD step for Dayo, however, will take him back to dental school, this time in the United States, where he will need to complete two years of clinical work. Currently, Dayo has been offered admission to the University of Minnesota School of Dentistry Program for Advanced Standing Students to complete these 2 years and obtain the American DDS.

Growing up in Nigeria, Dayo was only four or five when a visit to the doctor's office gave him a life's direction. "Even in my earliest days, when I didn't know what it meant, I had a passion to become a medical practitioner," he says. At the University of Ibadan, he had completed his premedical training, when a professor persuaded him to make a small course correction. "We need a lot of people in dentistry," the professor told him, "and you have the brain to do it. You can make a lot of difference here."

After completing his dental degree at Ibadan (U.S. universities will credit him for two years of that coursework), Dayo sought and earned a three-month research grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation through the University of Ibadan. The grant was used to study the neuro-protective role of recombinant interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (rhIL-1ra) after Traumatic Brain injury (TBI) in Sprague dawley rats with Dr. Anna Taylor, UCLA Department of Neurobiology. This work served as Dayo's thesis work for the MSc Anatomy degree issued by the University of Ibadan. Dayo parlayed the 3 month opportunity into admission for graduate studies.

His wife is a medical doctor seeking a residency in psychiatry—and, of course, they’re hoping that they can find places at the same school "or at the worst, schools that are very close together," Dayo says. After his dental degree, Dayo will look for a residency in oral pathology/oral medicine or oral and maxillofacial surgery, with the long-term goal of getting a job at a university where he can both teach and "bring dentistry from the bench to the bedside."

Published in Winter 2008, Graduate Quarterly