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ÈÕ±¾avÊÓƵ associate professor Rachel Willand-Charnley received an endowment from Bill and Nancy Wadsworth earlier this year. The funding will help Willand-Charnley accelerate cancer research at SDState. 

At ÈÕ±¾avÊÓƵ, students learn about the "" early on during their organic chemistry courses. The reaction, which describes a common synthetic method in natural product synthesis, was first described by Leopold Horner in 1958 and then refined by both William Emmons and a man by the name of William "Bill" Wadsworth, who served as a professor of chemistry at SDState from 1963 until his retirement.

This fall, Wadsworth, and his late wife Nancy, started an endowment to support chemistry research at SDState. It was only fitting that Rachel Willand-Charnley, an associate professor in the College of Natural Sciences who teaches her students about the Horner-Wadsworth-Emmons reaction, was named the university's first Bill and Nancy Wadsworth Research Faculty Scholar in Chemistry.

"I am honored to receive this endowment from the Wadsworth family," Willand-Charnley said. "To have a reaction named after you is an incredible achievement as an Organic Chemist and I am truly excited to carry on Bill's legacy of impactful chemistry research here at South Dakota State."

Willand-Charnley recognized the university was missing an interdisciplinary chemical-biology research cluster in its research portfolio. Chemical biology is an interdisciplinary field that uses expertise and tools of chemistry to study and manipulate biological processes and develops new diagnostic tools and therapeutics.  It is a rapidly developing cornerstone of biomedical research.

As a chemical biologist by training who specializes in interdisciplinary-applied organic chemistry and glyco-cancer immunology research, Willand-Charnley's work aims to identify chronic biological problems facing society and to generate sustainable solutions using chemical biology. With funding from the Wadsworth endowment, Willand-Charnley will lead a chemical biology research cluster aimed at providing sustainable solutions to combat cancer’s exploitation of simple sugars to evade immune detection.

"We are so grateful to the Wadsworths for helping us realize our vision to grow new areas of research. This endowment will have a long-lasting impact by stimulating team science in chemistry," said Sen Subramanian, dean of SDState's College of Natural Sciences. "Rachel had proposed an exciting chemical biology cluster which was highly appreciated by the review committee. We are looking forward to the team’s accomplishments and growth."

Currently, Willand-Charnley's lab is working to understand how cancers use sugars to survive. This research is leading to the development of novel synthetic methods, which are directly used for therapeutics.

"My lab is focused on understanding how cancers utilize sugar to participate in tumorigenic processes, metastasis, immune evasion and multidrug resistance, Willand-Charnley explained. "The lab has identified a specific sugar that allows colon and lung cancers to survive."

With funding from the Wadsworth endowment, Willand-Charnley will lead a new research cluster, composed of other SDState faculty members, external colleagues and graduate students, aimed at developing a glycan therapeutic.

"A team with strong scientific expertise in computational analysis, biochemistry, glyco-cancer immunology and organic chemistry has been assembled to address this critical biological problem facing society, including therapeutic development ," Willand-Charnley said.