University of Memphis Highly Cited Faculty Series

Celebrating UofM Faculty

The Division of Research and Innovation is celebrating those faculty who have, in the course of their academic career, received the most citations across the most papers among our current research faculty members. These faculty were selected utilizing Scopus H Index which reflects a high level of research activity. This series will appear monthly in the Division of Research and Innovation newsletter throughout the year.

February Faculty Highlight, Dr. Tom Sutter, Department of Biological Sciences

It was the 1980s, and Dr. Tom Sutter, professor and the W. Harry Feinstone Chair of Excellence in Molecular Biology at the University of Memphis, knew exactly what his future looked like.

As a grad student at the University of Cincinnati, he was planning to become a corporate vice-president at a chemical company, not an academic scientist. He saw the salary range for heads of toxicology in the corporate world and thought it sounded pretty good.

Then he was assigned to work with Dr. Jack Loper in the department of Molecular Genetics, Biochemistry and Microbiology at Cincinnati, and the plan changed.

“I learned molecular biology and biochemistry working on sterol biosynthesis in yeast – yes, what makes bread and beer,” he said. “The enzyme was sterol 14-demethylase (CYP51), the target for the imidazole antifungal agents such as ketoconazole.

“It was the beginning of cloning genes and sequencing them, and I just fell in love with it,” he said. “It was cool. It was hard. But it was all new.” He got his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Environmental Health Sciences.

Sutter then began focusing on chemical carcinogenesis, exploring how chemicals and the environment caused cancer. “There was not a lot known about how chemicals got into your body and altered your DNA to lead to cancer,” he said.

“The chemical I work on is dioxin,” or 2,3,7,8- Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, he said, most well-known for being one of the components of the herbicide and defoliant Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War. Dioxin had been shown to cause cancer in multiple species and multiple organs. In Japan, an accident caused several thousand people to develop chloracne, a skin disorder related to long-term exposure to dioxin.

Sutter, who had been working on sequencing individual genes and trying to understand their function, got interested in how sets of genes were regulated and, specifically, how genes control physiologic processes like cancer. His focus became how genes affect various cells in the multiple layers of the skin.

“At that time, people were asking how these proteins called transcription factor regulate a gene, and how does the regulation of sets of genes control physiologic processes?” he said. “I began doing genome science in the pre-genome era.”

During his time as a post-doc at the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology in North Carolina, Sutter​ began to study dioxin using a technology called differential hybridization, which allowed him to capture genes that were being regulated in skin in response to treatment. That work became the paper published in the prestigious journal Science in 1991: “Targets for Dioxin: Genes for Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor-2 and Interleukin-1beta, Thomas Sutter, Karen Guzman, Karen Dold and William Greenlee: Science 254: 415-418.”

The Science paper launched Sutter’s academic career, bringing him to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 1991. “One of the unknown genes in (the Science paper) turned out to be CYP1B1, my most-cited discovery,” said Dr. Sutter. “I still have a project on this in the lab related to triple-negative breast cancer.” 

Sutter arrived at the University of Memphis from Hopkins in 1999. He now holds a dual appointment in the departments of chemistry and biology, though biology is his primary appointment; he is also Director of the W. Harry Feinstone Center for Genomic Research. The W. Harry Feinstone Chair of Excellence in Molecular Biology Sutter holds is the first-ever endowed Chair of Excellence at the university.

“What’s interesting is that work (published in Science) took four people three years plus $250,000,” Dr. Sutter said. “By the time I arrived (at the University of Memphis), the technology called microarray had been developed. I could repeat that study in two weeks for $12,000. The new technology was just amazing. But what came with that is the need to understand all that data with bioinformatics and other disciplines as part of our work.”

The endowed chair at the University of Memphis allowed Sutter to continue his work on dioxin but also spend time learning how to use new technology to study the function of those new gene sets, including relearning math and statistics.

In academic science, he said, “when you make a discovery, you have to study that discovery and keep going down the most logical path. I’m not the most linear person.” The endowed chair and the research partnerships he built in Memphis and beyond gave him new directions to explore. “I really got to roll up my sleeves and dig in,” he said. 

“What I wanted to know was: How do you take a series of genes that are differentially expressed and understand how they change a cell’s behavior? And that can be whether you're trying to use a drug to cure a disease, or whether you're trying to understand how a chemical causes cancer to grow.

“At the University of Memphis, I got to continue the basic science of this work as well as its supply side.”

Sutter and his lab colleagues also continued to work on the gene that had led to the Science paper.

“What we did was we expressed that gene. We made the proteins and the yeasts and we published two really important papers. The first shows that this enzyme is one of the most important enzymes in activating chemical carcinogens in our bodies.

“Most carcinogens we’re exposed to get metabolized, and it’s the metabolites that actually cause cell mutations. We showed that the enzyme cytochrome P4501B1 or CYP1B1 was really important in activating carcinogens in cigarette smoke, air pollution and all kind of products.

“Today, that’s probably what drives most of my impact factors – there are several hundred citations of each of those two papers.”

Sutter points out that he always strives to work at two levels: “At the basic level, we try to advance the approach to studying the problem, e.g. methodology or technology. At the applied level, we study the action of specific targets (usually receptors or enzymes) in the context of toxicology or pharmacology toward improving a treatment or developing a strategy to prevent disease.

“With dioxin, we started out asking how coordinate gene regulation controls a pathologic response to an environmental stimulus. Currently, we are trying to define temporal and spatial regulation in relation to cell physiology in our cell culture studies and disease and disease modification in our organismal research.

“Related to skin, this involves studies to understand cell differentiation, and epidermal barrier development, function, and repair in the context of chloracne, atopic dermatitis and psoriasis.”

Sutter’s newest NIH grant will study how the aryl hydrocarbon (AH) receptor facilitates communication between host and microbe. His lab currently has two active NIH grants, with another targeted to start mid-2022. He has received funding 20 times.

Sutter is quick to recognize the vision of the late Dr. W. Harry Feinstone, an accomplished scientist who pioneered many drugs in his lifetime and retired as the vice-president of research and development at Memphis-based Schering-Plough in 1976. After that, Dr. Feinstone began a second career as an academic and was the University of Memphis’s first Distinguished Research Professor, which helped him see the power of attracting and funding talented, eager faculty members and led to the endowed chair.

Said Sutter: “At Memphis, I have trained eight doctoral students, three of whom have become university professors. Numerous undergraduates, master’s students and post-doctoral fellows have trained and performed research in our laboratory.

“All of this was made possible by the forethought and generosity of Dr. W. Harry Feinstone.”