Beckman Young Investigators Award (1991) Maria Sibylla Merian Award, Germany (1998) Merck Prize (European Thyroid Association), Poland (2001) Rose Pitt-Rivers Lecturer at the British Endocrine Society Meeting, Glasgow (2003) Coleman Fellow in Life Sciences, Ben-Gurion University, Israel (2008) Marshall S. Horwitz Faculty Prize for Research Excellence (2009) Light of Life Award (2010) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2015) Sidney H. Ingbar Distinguished Lecturer, American Thyroid Association (2016) Plenary Lecturer, 1st International Meeting on Science, Health, and Gender, Mexico (2018) Biophysics Nancy Carrasco is a professor in, and the chair of, the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at Vanderbilt University.
[2] She cloned the sodium/iodide symporter (NIS), a breakthrough in thyroid pathophysiology with ramifications for many other fields, including structure/function of transport proteins, molecular endocrinology, gene transfer studies, cancer, and public health (she has served on the Environmental Protection Agency's science advisory board).
[7] Carrasco's research group was the first to clone, and extensively characterize at the molecular level, the sodium/iodide symporter (NIS), the key plasma membrane protein that mediates the active transport of iodide into the thyroid, the lactating breast, and other tissues.
[6][1] Carrasco's group has obtained a great deal of mechanistic information on NIS by determining the molecular requirements of this protein at amino acid positions at which mutations have been found in patients.
In addition, her group recently identified an allosteric site in NIS—which, when occupied by an oxyanion such as perchlorate, completely changes the mechanism by which NIS transports iodide.
The Carrasco group's NIS knockout mouse has made it possible to generate an animal model of hypothyroidism without the need to use any drugs (e.g., methimazole or propylthiouracil).