In a bustling lab tucked away on the back side of the sixth floor of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, a 25-year veteran of Vanderbilt has been receiving and analyzing tissue that could one day hold the key to conquering cancer.
Her name is Kim Johnson. She's a Senior Research Specialist who has had a hand in a great deal of the tissue used at Vanderbilt-Ingram for the last 12 years. Any tissue that anyone uses here in the laboratory, I pretty much deal with, said Johnson.
Her boss, Jennifer Pietenpol, Ph.D., whose lab is currently researching breast cancer, said Johnson does thousands of different things in her lab, but tissue is her strong suit. Her knowledge of tissue, from acquisition to processing, is invaluable, said Pietenpol.
Roy Jensen, M.D., director of the Kansas Masonic Cancer Research Institute at the University of Kansas Medical Center, and a previous Vanderbilt employee, continues to be a mentor to Johnson. He's the person responsible for hiring her as one of the first employees of Vanderbilt-Ingram. Jensen said Johnson played a major role in building the tissue acquisition department at Vanderbilt-Ingram. She's a tremendous asset, not only for her knowledge of tissue collection and histology, but she's also extraordinarily enthusiastic and supportive of research and of PI's [primary investigators] trying to do new things, said Jensen.
One of Johnson's primary roles in tissue acquisition is collecting and studying normal, human breast tissue collected from breast reduction surgeries performed at Vanderbilt. We acquire normal breast tissue from reduction mammoplasties to understand what signaling is normal in a cell, and that gives us clues to what goes wrong in a tumor cell, said Pietenpol.
Johnson's job is to isolate single cells from the tissue samples. I look at how these cells grow, die, and the intercellular changes in hopes that we can mimic what cells do in the body, explained Johnson. We can cause those same gene alterations that happen when cancer starts, she added.
Pietenpol said Johnson is also known for her caring and generous way with others in the lab, and said she always shows up with a smile on her face. She has a real sense of responsibility, but a great sense of decency and caring. She has hundreds of friends and family members and she is loyal to her colleagues here at work and very loyal to her friends and family.
Johnson also plays something of the mother hen or keeper of the lab to the numerous students who come and go from Vanderbilt-Ingram. I'm the lab momma, I think, said Johnson.
Her own family's experiences with cancer have fueled her passion for research. Johnson's mother survived kidney cancer, but both her mother-in-law and her stepfather died within the past year from cancer. What we're doing here in the labs now hopefully is going to alter treatment and diagnosis. The ultimate goal is to make this applicable to patients by extending lives. Somebody who is dear to me, their treatment could be a direct response from something that has happened here in the Cancer Center. 
- by Heather L. Hall
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