Victor Leo, Entry #1: Fun Beginnings!

Hello fellow EXPers!

I have been working at my lab for about two weeks now and it has been a really interesting experience. My lab focuses on the early detection of pancreatic cancer, which encompasses the screening of the pancreas as well as the search for viable biomarkers that pertain to pancreatic cancer. My main job around here is to help out with the CAPS 5 study. The CAPS 5 project is one of the three main projects that this lab is currently pursuing. This CAPS 5 study is an on-going project and is an acronym that stands for Cancer of the Pancreas Screening Study (don't know why there is an A in the middle of the acronym). The CAPS study has been ongoing for 15 years now and it is now in its fifth form. The CAPS study (as its name suggests) screens patients and takes patient's blood samples from people who are at high risk for pancreatic cancer as well as people that are not at high risk (controls). Patients that are at high risk usually means that they have strong familial connection to pancreatic cancer but it could also mean that they exhibit certain mutations that are known to promote risk for pancreatic cancer such as a mutation in either of the BRCAs or P16 genes. Additionally people with Peutz-Jeghers syndrome are also considered at high risk for pancreatic cancer and are invited to participate in the study while control samples are taken for the purpose of comparison. The main hope of this study is to further determine what exactly causes the risk of pancreatic cancer in certain families and to better understand what can lead to pancreatic cancer in order to create countermeasures to that. I help out in this study mainly by processing the blood that we receive from patients and by going through EUS (endoscopic ultra sound) reports that are given by the doctor and entering data that is provided by the reports into an online database. The exact procedure of the processing of the blood depends on which study the blood is for but for the most part the blood that we receive needs to first be centrifuged a number of times and then the plasma needs to be aliquoted into smaller tubes with protease inhibiter. For EUS reports certain information needs to be drawn from the surgical reports and put into the shared database. Things like the number of lesions and whether they exhibit thick or thin septations as well as other thinks like lobularity and calcification are considered necessary information.

My Building! (CRB2, Cancer Research Building 2)

I am glad to say that everyone is the lab is extremely friendly and are very welcoming and understanding. In my lab, I work directly under a very nice graduate student and work together with 3 helpful undergraduates. We are all assigned with mainly helping out with the CAPS study and it has been a pleasure to work with them. I could not ask more from my workmates as everyone in the lab was very understanding when I continuously got lost on the way to lab all throughout the first week and when I messed up the samples on my first day. Although I do not get to see my PI very much because he is very busy and always in and out of the lab (he also wasn't there for the first week) my grad student mentor has taught me a lot and I greatly appreciate everything that he does for me. I will have more pictures of my experiments next time!