Sisterly bond: Three Engeviks having fun collaborating, studying the gut

Growing up in a rural area in a time before smartphones, the three Engevik girls were each other’s best playmates. They explored the land, searching for cool rocks and classifying plants, and returned to a house decorated with their physician great-grandfather’s medical equipment where their father, also a physician, practiced his medical student lectures on them.

As they graduated from high school one by one and headed off to college, that intense bond formed by daily life together could have faded. But a couple of decades later, the Engevik sisters are as much besties as they ever were – only now, instead of hunting for rocks in the yard, each is running her own lab, hunting for answers about how changes in the gut affect human health.

Mindy Engevik, Ph.D., Amy Engevik, Ph.D., and Kristen Engevik, Ph.D., are assistant professors in the Department of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology at MUSC and researchers within MUSC Hollings Cancer Center.

Walk down a sixth-floor hallway in the Basic Science Building at MUSC and you’ll find you keep running across an Engevik Lab. The close proximity makes it easier to pop in and out as they share ideas – not that science is limited to regular hours on campus. Even birthday get-togethers turn into opportunities to talk about their research.

“We view science as a lifestyle,” Mindy laughed.

It should be noted that although all three sisters went to Biola University for undergrad and then to the University of Cincinnati for graduate work – following a path forged by Mindy – the fact that all three ended up working in gastrointestinal (GI) research was something of a fluke, influenced by the mentors they found in Cincinnati.

“Also, the GI community is very welcoming and supportive. And so it was really easy for us to see a lot of the benefits of studying gut research,” Mindy said.

Each has chosen a different line of research.

Mindy Engevik

“I'm interested in how gut microbes influence health and disease. On the healthy side, I'm really interested in bifidobacteria. They have a lot of enzymes that can degrade mucus, and mucus is a big problem for mucinous adenocarcinomas.

“In a lot of cancers, the way that they survive is they'll start to produce a huge mucus layer, and that makes them very resistant to chemotherapies. I want to try to use commensal microbes that can degrade that mucus to make it easier for chemotherapies to enter those mucinous adenocarcinomas and kill the cancers.”

In short: “I think we can harness microbes to do good things for us.”

Amy Engevik

“I study the stomach and the intestine, and part of my work focuses on a molecular motor called myosin 5b. It's really drastically reduced in a number of different cancers, like colorectal cancer, and then upregulated in other cancers like uterine cancer and ovarian cancer.

“So part of my work is looking at what myosin 5b is doing in cancers. Another aspect of my work is studying a metaplastic lesion that is a precancerous lesion and how that is related to a high-fat diet.”

Metaplastic refers to cells that have changed from one type of cell to another that wouldn’t normally be found in that location.

“High-fat diets seem to really impact the stomach, which most people don't think about. It's usually thought of in relation to the intestine or liver. But it actually causes these huge gastric lesions that are known to be a field where cancer arises.

“So what is happening in that environment that could predispose people who are obese to gastric cancer?”

Kristen Engevik

“I'm really interested in cell to cell communication, specifically through what's known as purinergic signaling. So it's extracellular purines that you find in the environment that can come from both host cells as well as microbes. And I'm really interested in what happens to this communication during cancer.

“In most cancers it seems to be really downregulated. In prostate cancer, some researchers have proposed that this may be because this signal is pro-apoptotic, and the cancer environment wants it downregulated because otherwise you have apoptosis.”

Apoptosis is a process that leads to cell death, and it’s used by the body to clear out abnormal cells.

“So what is downregulating this? And can you use this as a potential therapeutic to help drive apoptosis to lessen the size of cancerous tumors? And my current focus is in colorectal cancer because that's where we see a lot of evidence right now.”

 

Pursuing science careers

The sisters didn’t initially intend to all go into science. In fact, Amy was in law school with an idea of maybe going into patent law while Mindy earned a master’s in microbiology.

“It was not for me,” Amy said. “After a year, I was like, ‘No. I don’t want to do this.’”

Mindy picked up the story. “I had just started the Ph.D. program, and I was like, ‘Amy, you should stop law school and come do a Ph.D. with me. I’m having so much fun.’”

While the two oldest pursued their doctorates, younger sister Kristen joined them in the summers.

“She came to my lab as a summer student and did research. And so all three of us were doing research together in the gut and having a lot of fun,” Mindy said.

To the everlasting astonishment of colleagues – faculty jobs being notoriously difficult to get, much less when two people are job-hunting together – Mindy and Amy succeeded in getting assistant professor positions at MUSC in 2020 and 2021. Kristen followed last fall.

“I think it makes me love science more to do it with people I love and people who are so supportive,” said Amy.

They’ve also found a welcoming community.

“I feel like MUSC has a very supportive environment. We love our department chair, Steve (Stephen Duncan, D.Phil.),” Mindy said.

“The GI community here is really great, and it’s ramping up, which is exciting for us. It's nice to be in an institute that really values GI research,” Amy said.

“And the cancer researchers here were very inviting and really brought us into the fold,” Mindy said.

“I think it is pretty unique,” Amy added. “I think a lot of universities are very competitive, especially within cancer biology.”

“I think people worried that we would be exclusive and only collaborate with each other. But I think it is such a great environment here at MUSC that we've been able to have wide collaboration that really benefits our research,” Amy explained. “It's also great to collaborate with each other.”

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