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 different, or diverse.

The grant goes on to talk about how limited the treatment options for PDAC are, and how its a fast growing cancer overall. The data is mostly how the three specific aims are: testing hypothesis about how signaling through the adenosine 2b receptor is needed for cancer progression and initiation, as well as KRAS-driven cancer cell signaling. The last, and third specific aim is testing the hypothesis on how targeting that same adenosine signaling through the 2b receptor is a good immunotherapy approach on treating PDAC as a whole.

Afterwards, I had finished reading up the grant, and headed straight home.

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