Day 1 - My First Steps into the Lab

Despite this only being the first day of my ventures into the lab, it had become one full of information and discoveries.

I had started my day coming into Memorial Hermann, and making my way up to the lab where I would be working in for the next two weeks. I had started off my journey into the world of learning about pancreatic cancer by reading up on some background information, so that I would be able to understand what exactly I would be seeing and/or doing in the next days to come. I first read somewhat of a long grant about targeting a specific chemical in your body called adenosine, to specifically help the immune system enhance it's response to cancer within your body.

Throughout reading this grant, it seemed to have many terms that I wasn't very familiar with, such as some keywords like: Adenosine, A2a receptor, Checkpoint blockade, PD-1, CD39, CD73, CTLA-4, and many others. When I finished reading the grant, the doctor that I am planning to work with had gone through the grant with me once again to help me get through and process most of the information that I will need to understand the experiments I will be participating in later this week, as well as next week.
I had found out throughout a further explanation of the specific parts of this grant was that, I was reading about the role of adenosine receptors in pancreatic cancer, and their role in immunotherapy against different types of cancers as well.

The background information that I had read in this grant today will definitely be beneficial for me to be able to understand what exactly that I will be doing in this lab, like experiments and many more activities. Even if this information may take awhile for me to fully process before I understand it all, it was still a very productive and useful day for the first day of my J-Term.

Afterwards, I had headed home and I can say that this day was a great start to my first independent J-Term on "Researching Pancreatic Cancer."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 3 - Researching, researching, and more researching

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...
Read more

Day 7 - A Little Lesson on Grants

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...
Read more