Week 2

This week I shadowed Charlie's mentor, Dr. Scherr, during some of his surgeries. One surgery was a gall bladder removal followed by the removal of a kidney tumor. A fellow said most gall bladder removals are done robotically here, so we were lucky to observe an open surgery. As a senior in college, I took a biomedical engineering design class that collaborated with local medical device companies and our mentors always emphasized that ORs don't have much free space. Yet I was still amazed at just how jam-packed an OR room is with supplies. And there are always many, many other things that become necessary in the course of a surgery. I wondered how long it takes a nurse to learn where everything is once they starting working in the OR.

I also spent time in Dr. Giannakakou's laboratory. Her laboratory studies the cytoskeleton of cells and how anti-tumor drugs effect the microtubule system. Her lab has a lot of amazing equipment, including a CellSearch machine, which is a circulating tumor cell (CTC) isolation system. It is the commercial state of the art in CTC isolation. Capturing CTCs from a patient blood sample is much less invasive and more practical than performing biopsies on the tumor itself, so this technique is quite popular in many medical and research settings. Researchers have been able to use the CellSearch to corrolate CTC count with patient mortality, but more in depth cellular biomechanics studies are difficult because of the way CTCs are processed by the CellSearch.

I observed how blood samples are prepared for and processed by the CellSearch and how Dr. Giannakakou's lab fixes and stains the CTCs for imaging. Staining and imaging while preserving microtubule integrity is extremely challenging, especially since nonspecific capture of other cell types can confound results. It is very useful to see the benefits and challenges that researchers and clinicians face now trying to use CTCs as diagnostic tools. It helps me understand the scope of my project better and will hopefully lead to new research directions in course of my PhD work.