Renee LeClair's research at Maine Medical Center Research Institute could factor in future treatments for arthritis, kidney disease and liver disease

Story and photo by Marc Glass (Spring 2007 issue)

Renee LeClair ’01 earned a bachelor’s in biology in three years and a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Houston’s Rice University in only four. (Especially impressive, considering that earning a doctorate inside a decade is no small feat in the sciences.)

No longer a Mainer in exile, the Winslow native now has a post-doctoral research fellowship at Maine Medical Center Research Institute in Scarborough, where her focus is collagen triple helix repeat containing 1, a protein that appears in higher concentrations after vascular injuries in the body. In large amounts the protein is able to reduce fibrotic lesions that form on injured vessels, ultimately causing them to become brittle and fail. Boosting the protein could help a patient recovering from angioplasty keep aortic vessels supple and strong.

“Ultimately, if you could create a small molecule that would mimic the effect of the protein in an oral drug and introduce that drug at the time of a surgical procedure, then you could address a slate of problems involving fibrosis,” LeClair said. “Arthritis, kidney disease and liver disease—anything involving fibrosis could be treated.”

Recently LeClair has collaborated on studies showing a reduction in vessel blockage when the protein’s presence is artificially increased. This work was published in Circulation Research, an American Heart Association research journal, and has been accepted for publication by Trends in Cardiovascular Medicine, another research journal. Now she’s in the throes of writing an application for a National Institute of Health grant to fund continuation of her research. For support, she emailed Ron Butler, professor of biology, for a vital letter of recommendation, attesting to LeClair’s skill as a research scientist and writer.

“He shortly sent me back an e-mail saying he would write the letter for me, but he also encouraged me to spell check my emails and corrected my grammar in the previous e-mail I sent,” laughed LeClair about the unflagging high standards.

LeClair said an appreciation for the amount and quality of writing required of her at UMF was realized only later at Rice, a school she chose based on its rigor, relatively small size (1,200 graduate students), plentiful rotations at nearby Texas Medical Center and offer of full funding. Surrounded by fellow graduate students who earned their mortarboards at places like Cornell, Harvard and Princeton, LeClair said she initially lost some pluck.

“I felt I was in over my head. I was from somewhere that no one heard of,” she said.

And then the completely unexpected happened. One of LeClair’s classmates, “who never missed an opportunity to remind anyone who would listen that she went to Cornell,” began to falter. “Her whole approach was, ‘I’m from Cornell, I shouldn’t need any help,’” LeClair said.

When Rice professors began to hold up LeClair’s lab reports as instructional models for other students, LeClair knew she was established. And so it was that LeClair learned one of the most important lessons of her graduate studies: the laboratory is a level playing field, a meritocracy where skill is the sole determinant for success.

“My peers [at Rice] struggled with the amount of writing professors demanded because their undergraduate exams were pure memorization. Their schools were so big that’s all their professors asked of them,” she said. “We wrote so much at UMF because the natural science program is small, and our professors could demand that of us. My peers had multiple-choice take-home exams in college. There was no flim flam at UMF. I didn’t realize what a great education I was getting there.”