In her dual role as a TGen investigator and a medical school instructor, it is not enough for Dr. Suwon "Sue" Kim to simply teach.

She wants her doctors-in-training to go beyond memorizing texts and jump into research riddles. "I like solving puzzles," said Kim, who serves as a cancer researcher and team leader in her own TGen lab, and also as an assistant professor of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Arizona Medical School – Phoenix – in partnership with Arizona State University.

Her medical students learn not only through textbooks and lectures, but also by solving medical mysteries based on real-world patients through Case Based Instruction, or CBI.

"It's a wonderful tool," said Kim, whose TGen lab is immediately north of the historic former Phoenix Union High School buildings that make up the core of the downtown Phoenix medical school. "You are teaching them how to learn, not only what to learn."

Based on the past medical histories of real patients, Kim’s students are given symptoms and other basic information. They work in groups, tasking each other to come up with diagnosis, scientific causes of the diseases or conditions, and recommended treatments.

"We are training future physicians of the 21st century," said Kim, noting that the medical school curricula emphasize personalized medicine and biomedical informatics. Personalized medicine is a cornerstone of TGen’s mission: to translate scientific findings into treatments tailor-made for individual patients. Biomedical informatics enables researchers to use huge amounts of genetic information to make groundbreaking medical discoveries.

There are 72 students at the medical school, which is in its second year of operations. There are 24 second-year medical students from the school’s initial class last year, and 48 first-year students.

Kim, who currently is researching genes that play a role in the development of breast cancer, knows what it is like to be mentored in an atmosphere of discovery.

Kim attended the University of California – Berkeley where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1988 in Microbiology and Immunology.

Moving to the East Coast, she received her doctorate in Genetics in 1998 from Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., where she studied the biology of protein folding in yeast.

For her post-doctoral work, Kim returned to the Bay Area where she studied from 1998-2006 at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco under Dr. J. Michael Bishop.

In 1989, Bishop and Dr. Harold E. Varmus, also of UCSF, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. Their insight – that normal cells contain genes capable of becoming cancer genes – helped fuel studies into the genetic origins of cancer, which is a huge part of the research efforts at TGen.

Under Bishop, lines of scientific inquiry were concept-driven, said Kim, allowing her to make huge strides in her specialty – the study of tumor-suppressor genes.

"They are the sentinels... They are the ones that guard normal cells against becoming cancer cells," said Kim, who since joining TGen in 2007 has continued to study the affects of ING4, a tumor-suppressor gene that goes missing in as many as one in five women with breast cancer.

"As you get older, you accumulate mutations. There are multiple steps that a cell goes through to become cancerous," said Kim, who identified tumor suppressor genes that can restore contact inhibition in cells.

"Cancer cells go nuts and override the signals from neighboring cells (contact inhibition) and they grow into tumors," she said.

Kim has shown that ING4, which she discovered during her post-doctoral work, can prevent normal cells from losing their contact inhibition. "We can see what it does, but we have no idea of how it does it. Now, we’re trying to figure out how ING4 works," she said.

In addition, Kim also is looking into the candidate biomarkers in patient blood that can be used to detect the presence of breast cancer. "Being one of the scientists at TGen has allowed me to go forward with my translational research," she said.

"We have a hard time controlling cancer because we detect it so late," Kim said. After treating cancer cells with chemotherapy, "some survive, and they come back with a vengeance. The whole idea in cancer treatment is that we need to detect it early. Prevention and early detection is the best way to control cancer – and our best hope to cure cancer."