About Andrew

Dr. Andrew Hsieh is a physician-scientist and cancer biologist who works at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Andrew grew up in southern California, and spent his time hanging out with friends and running for his school's track and cross country teams. He was very talkative and loved asking questions. Growing up in an immigrant family, he had to learn how things work in the American educational system and ultimately ended up getting his undergraduate degree at University of California, Berkeley. He is still a huge fan of the Golden Bears! In his free time, he enjoys watching his kids' sports games, chatting with his wife, exercising, and watching food shows on YouTube.

In his words: Overcoming obstacles

"To become a medical doctor you need to take a lot of standardized tests. The main one to get into medical school is called the MCAT. The first time I took the MCAT I did really poorly. I felt bad because I had put in a year's effort and did not do well. I remember talking to my father on the phone when I got my score. After listening to me he asked, "What are you going to do next?" I thought for second and then responded, "I'm going to take it again next year." In retrospect, that decision changed my life. It taught me that one really bad grade or score does not define a person. What defines an individual is how you respond. I spent another year preparing and I did well enough on the second try to get into medical school. This experience also taught me the importance of having a strong and loving support system around you."

Andrew's lab focuses on how the process of protein synthesis drives cancer formation. As you might remember from Biology last year, our DNA holds information that can be "read" and used to "build", or synthesize, proteins. Proteins are massive biomolecules that serve many purposes in our bodies--they provide structure (like keratin, the protein the forms our hair and nails), they help transport chemicals (like hemoglobin, which carries oxygen through our bloodstream), they are responsible for the movement of our muscles (that's what we're eating when we eat meat), and are an important part of our immune system (antibodies are proteins). Just to name a few!

Proteins are also involved in the process of turning DNA into other proteins. Some help with disassembling and reading the DNA, and some help build the protein. A large class of proteins, called transcription factors (TFs), are responsible for determining when and where protein synthesis happens, and at what rate. TFs can act as "on" and "off" switches, or more like volume dials, changing how much of a protein is made. Because we have all of our DNA in every cell, it's very important to have transcription factors that make sure the genes for creating stomach acid, for example, don't all of a sudden get activated in our skin cells!

Cancer occurs when normal body cells become abnormal and start to divide uncontrollably. While protein synthesis is necessary for our survival, it can also be taken over by cancer and used to its advantage--to help the cancer cells replicate and move to other parts of the body. Andrew and his teammates hope that a better understanding of how this happens will help them treat cancer more effectively.

In 2019, Andrew and a group of colleagues published the results of a study about prostate cancer. Prostate cancer affects the prostate gland, a walnut-sized organ that sits just below the bladder and wraps around the urethra, and whose job is to help make semen. It's one of the most common cancers in men and people assigned male at birth, and researchers are working hard to find more effective treatments.

Andrew and his team were looking at something called the androgen receptor as a potential target for a more effective prostate cancer treatment. The androgen receptor (AR) is a transcription factor that helps control the growth and development of the prostate. It works with the male sex hormone, androgen, to regulate protein synthesis. A common prostate cancer therapy is to deprive the cells of androgen--this temporarily stops the cancer from being able to use the AR to proliferate. However, that can actually lead to a more advanced form of prostate cancer, so it's not a good long term option.

While the link between the androgen receptor and cancer has been well-established, this study shed light on exactly what the androgen receptor does. Andrew and his team discovered that, while it is involved in protein synthesis, it's actually responsible for limiting the amount of of protein synthesis that occurs. In advanced prostate cancers where AR activity is low due to androgen deprivation treatment, AR is not doing its job to slow protein synthesis, allowing the cancer to grow faster. This discovery is exciting because it provides an important potential target for a drug that could limit advanced prostate cancer's ability to hijack protein synthesis in prostate cells.