Before Vadim Bichutskiy approached Dr. Lathrop about becoming his faculty mentor, he did his homework. He read Dr. Lathrop’s publications and was familiar with his interdisciplinary approach to research. Vadim suggests that anyone interested in undergraduate research should do the same before they choose a mentor, so they can find a professor whose interests are similar to their own. Now a graduate student at UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, Vadim plans to continue doing research to develop new drugs and improve health care. When he’s not in the lab, Vadim enjoys swimming, weight lifting, skiing, and playing chess.

p53 is a central tumor suppressor protein that is involved in cell cycle regulation. It is estimated that more than 50% of human cancers have p53 inactivated due to gene mutations. Therefore, the ability to restore function to p53 could have an enormous impact on cancer treatment. This project developed a heterogeneous database to support the search for small molecules that restore function to p53. We used a hybrid strategy that combines the data warehousing and mediation approaches to data integration. The database integrates small molecule data, such as computational docking results, with functional and structural assay results. It unites different research laboratories into a common framework, accessible through the Internet by all involved researchers. It provides for increased productivity and more efficient data sharing. This results in improved chances of finding small molecules that restore function to p53 and can be developed into new anti-cancer drugs.

Richard Lathrop Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

This paper is an elegant example of how faculty-mentored undergraduate research can be both an excellent learning experience for the undergraduate and a real contribution to interdisciplinary attacks on important scientific and technological problems of our day. The topic of this paper, heterogeneous databases, is a difficult and important problem in computer science. The application is to p53, which is an important medical problem because it is a central cancer-related protein. Over half of all human cancers have a mutation in the p53 gene, which inactivates a central tumor-suppressor pathway. Thus, the undergraduate research activity behind this paper addressed challenging problems on several fronts, and its successful completion proved to be both interesting and useful.