Dr. Lisabeth's ADDRC Lab Offers Opportunity to Find Answers to Tough Questions

By Chuck Carlson

Sooner or later, it seems, everyone stops in to consult with Dr. Erika Lisabeth and seeks answers from her Assay Development and Drug Repurposing Core (ADDRC) lab.

And for Dr. Lisabeth, in her third year as the ADDRC director, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

“It’s helping people whether it’s faculty, students, postdocs, whoever,” she said. “It’s helping people get their assays or protocols working over and over and trying to get it in a more high-throughput manner and doing things on a smaller scale. At the heart of it, we try to get the most bang for the buck in terms of data.”

Dr. Lisabeth’s core lab is at the heart of the intricate, often repetitive, and necessary testing that is so crucial to academic drug discovery. This work is being done not only by the faculty and students in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology but also by scientists all around campus.

In fact, her lab contains highly specialized equipment that is not available anywhere else on campus. Because the lab is a core, this equipment available to all who would like to use it. As a result, her lab is available 24 hours a day for MSU-wide science projects. The lab can also be accessed by the many small biotech companies that are popping up around Lansing.

“There’s even a small biotech in Wisconsin that I’m doing contract work for since I have the high-throughput instrumentation they need,” she said. “And I help grad students using instrumentation, but also with data analysis. They’ll ask, ‘What does this mean?’ ‘Is it right?’ I really want everybody’s experiments to work. That doesn’t always happen, but if the instrumentation is there, the setup is correct, and the controls are working well. That gives me the greatest satisfaction.”

The ADDRC also does drug repurposing -- using high-throughput screening to find new drugs and to screen known drugs to see if they have potentially new purposes in treating another disease. The core can also screen small molecules that aren’t necessarily drugs to see if they can “treat” or target diseases or proteins of interest to perhaps find new drugs.

“We do a lot,” she said.

And it’s done with top-of-the-line equipment from plate readers, high-content microscopes to biophysical instrumentation such as Surface Plasmon Resonance and Isothermal Titration Calorimetry that can directly measure protein and drug interactions.

Then there’s, perhaps, the centerpiece of the lab -- the Liquid Handling Robot, which can automate workflows to save time and, the key to so much research, money.

Dr. Lisabeth said with proper training, the equipment is open to all who need it.

“We want everyone to use it,” she said. “People can come, and they don’t feel pressure.”

In truth, this wasn’t exactly the role Dr. Lisabeth expected when she returned to Michigan State in 2014 to work with Dr. Richard Neubig and the recently created ADDRC.

She earned her BS in chemistry from Michigan State and her Ph.D. in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of California-San Diego. From there, she did postdoctoral work in cancer research at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in California before returning to East Lansing.

While she used her knowledge of biochemistry and cancer research initially at MSU, when the opportunity to become director of the ADDRC presented itself, she was ready.

“It’s a perfect fit for my interest in drug discovery and helping people,” she said.

And she believes her background in biochemistry and cancer has helped guide the various researchers in their projects.

“I guess my interests have been more varied,” she said. “People can come in and say, ‘Erika, have you done this?’ and I’ll say, ‘Yeah, I’ve done that before.’”

Then she laughs.

“I guess I’m a Jack of All Trades and a Master of None. But I think it’s actually really helpful for these students.”

Optimistic and enthusiastic and passionate, every day offers something new for Dr. Lisabeth and her lab.

“I always like a challenge,” she said. “I know we can get an assay to work. I’m always very positive, very optimistic even though I know full well nothing ever works on the first try. It’s an unusual thing we do here, and I have fun.”