Researching Pancreatic Cancer J-Term 2020

For my final day at the lab, I made my way one last time to Memorial Hermann. Then, up to the lab for some more work. In the morning, I began to shadow a doctor who was doing Flow cytometry. Flow cytometry is a procedure done to figure out what kinds of cells are present in the tissue that you are currently looking at. You have to use antibodies with specific colors on them to be able to detect the different cell populations, as well as tell them all apart within the tissue. At times, when you're looking for a very rare cell in a tissue, you want to be able to identify the majot population first, so that you can single out the rare population with a different color instead. This way, you can get rid of the larger population, and find the smaller population instead. Besides that, there wasn't much else to do in my final day at the lab, so afterwards I just headed back home. This concludes the end of my J-Term of Researching Pancreatic Cancer.

Once again, I made my way up to the lab in Memorial Hermann. Today, there wasn't much research today as there was just more of an explanation and further reading of the grant I had read earlier last week. I started to read the Specific Aims part of the grant, to further understand what exactly this lab needed to accomplish and aim for in terms of cancer research. I was also trying to relate this to all the other experiments I had done in these past two weeks. Now understanding what the Specific Aims part of this grant was talking about, I can say that it was mostly talking about the main goal of this research, which would be that these researchers are trying to study how adenosine and the adenosine 2b receptor promote, and help pancreatic cancer (PDAC) grow. It goes on to say how this pathway of adenosine helps promote the progression of tumors in pancreatic cancer, and that they still don't know if the adenosine receptors (AR) expression on these tumor cells is the differe

I headed up to the lab in Memorial Hermann once again, starting new lab work that I wasn't familiar with yet. I first went to see the mice that the doctors had been working with so far, and waited out after they had to collect the red blood cells and bone marrow derived macrophages from the mice. They took the long bones of the mouse, cleaned off all the muscle, and flushed out all the bone marrow of all of its cells. Then, the docor filtered the cells to get rid of the remaining connective tissue that he didn't need, and spun them down in the centrifuge. He then resuspended them in ACK Buffer for five minutes, to get make the red blood cells burst, as he only needed to the bone marrow derived macrophages for these cell cultures. They were then spun down again to get rid of the red blood cells, and just have bone marrow pellets at the bottom of the flasks. The remaining bone marrow macrophages were resuspended in the media, and plated in the cell culture flasks with 20mls of t

For the first day of this second week, I made my way up to the lab once again. I started off my morning abruptly by continuing the lab work that the doctor I've been shadowing has been working on since last Monday. She started by plating 6 wells, and cleaned out the prior cell flasks that were used with PBS (Phosphate-buffered saline), so that the serum from the media that was used last Friday for the cell cultures would go away. If the serum from the media wasn't taken away, it wouldn't allow the cell bonds to break like we needed them to. She then added Trypsin to the cell flasks so that the cell bonds could then break. Then, we spun the flasks in the centrifuge, so that all of the cells could fall to the bottom of the flask, and form into a pellet at the bottom The cells were then resuspended in the media, checked for their cell count, and finally plated into the wells with a certain amount of media (dependent on their cell count). Then, in the afternoon we started RN

For the last day of the first week of my J-Term, I had finally started to work in the lab itself. I arrived at Memorial Hermann in the morning, and made my way to the same lab once again. I was then greeted by the doctor that I would be shadowing and working with today. We both walked over to the cell culture room, so that she could explain to me the ongoing experiment that she was working on. She was working on cell cultures of course, and specifically, how CD73 plays a role in turning Adenosine into ATP, and how silencing that same CD73 changes the process as a whole. After a brief explanation of what we would be doing for that morning, for the remainder of this morning I watched her work on the controls that she needed for this experiment, as she already finished with the actual cell cultures a few days before, on Monday. She also explained what she was using for the controls, like the media, lipofectamine, etc. After she finished, we let them sit for 5 hours, and I went off to l

Today, I had taken a turn from reading grants to some interactive learning in the lab itself. I had gone up to the lab once again, and read a paper on immunology and cancer immunotherapy to brush up my knowledge on what I would be discussing later that afternoon. I went through most of the paper, understanding that it was mostly about how the immune system reacts to cancer in the body, as well as how this research that I am participating in is finding out ways to eliminate and have T cells and B cells deal with that lung and pancreatic specifically. Later that afternoon, I had gone into the lab and had a discussion about the specific research that I would be participating in tomorrow. The doctor and I had first spoken about the lung and pancreas as whole, even before talking about the cancer specifically. We then went over different parts of the lungs and pancreas, and then we looked at some slides under the microscope to get a real look at the lungs and pancreas of the mice that