Post-doc Experience at St. Jude Proves Invaluable to Dr. Diedrich in His New Role as Assistant Professor

It was a transformative and educational time for Dr. Jonathan Diedrich, who spent 2017-2020 as a postdoctoral fellow at the renowned St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, studying pediatric leukemia and gaining some of the best training he could have hoped for.

“It was the best place in the world,” he said. “The clinicians and scientists at St. Jude are some of the top leaders in the field that designed current standard treatment regimens for childhood leukemia and these treatments have saved many lives. I was really proud to be there and learn from the experts in the field of pharmacogenomics. It is a place and a mission that I will always be proud to say I was part of.”

He has brought that knowledge and experience to the MSU Pharmacology and Toxicology Department as one of the newest assistant professors, a position he started on Jan. 1, 2025, after spending precisely four years at MSU, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a research track assistant professor.**

A 2012 graduate of the MSU Lyman Briggs College with a degree in zoology, he initially thought he would attend veterinary or medical school.

“I took an honors research class as an undergraduate, and being that I was getting a zoology degree, I studied morphological differences in carnivore skulls to determine differences in skull structure based on the specific animal’s diet,” he said. “I thought it was a cool, but I also didn’t want to be in an attic with skulls for the rest of my life.”

He began looking at a subject that also intrigued him – cancer biology --and he gained his Ph.D. in the study of obesity and prostate cancer at Wayne State University under the mentorship of Dr. Izabela Podgorski.

“We were focused on the interaction between prostate cancer cells that had metastasized to bone and bone marrow fat cells and how these cancer cells utilize factors from the fat to fuel their own growth through changes in cellular metabolism,” he said.

He wanted to expand his skillsets and decided to pursue a post-doc at St. Jude in a growing field that had always interested him during his PhD training, pharmacogenomics. St. Jude specializes in the study and treatment of pediatric cancer and offered state-of-the-art resources to learn various techniques in functional genomics and pharmacology.

“Working at St. Jude was so fulfilling because you can make a direct impact on patients’ lives,” Dr. Diedrich said. “And you got to see the work you’re doing really has an impact. Sharing the elevators and cafeteria with patients and getting to know the parents of patients was extremely rewarding and motivated me to pursue a career in bench-to-bedside translational research."

Now, Dr. Diedrich is combining his two areas of expertise to determine epigenetic mechanisms of adipocyte-driven multiple myeloma progression and the development of drug resistance.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, obesity is a major risk factor for at least 13 different cancers. Multiple myeloma is the only hematological malignancy with increased risk associated with obesity, and obesity is a risk factor for multiple myeloma incidence, progression, and chemoresistance. “Individuals with obesity have higher rates of the disease, and they have more resistance to drugs and have higher rates of disease progression,” Dr. Diedrich said.

In his multiple myeloma research, he hopes to collaborate with experts in the field to build a database on patient genetic information and how patients respond to different drugs and ex vivo exposure to adipocytes.

“Multiple myeloma is an incurable hematological malignancy, and the main goal of my laboratory is to identify mechanisms of why patients progress (with their disease) so that we can identify targets to prevent progression,” he said. “A lot of patients will respond to drugs early but will develop resistance to the drugs. Using ex vivo, in vivo, and in vitro techniques, we want to identify and find ways to target these mechanisms of resistance to stop the disease before it gets any worse.”