I hope everyone had a wonderful Fourth of July. Fireworks are still going on in Baltimore even though the holiday was yesterday. As I write this there I can see and hear fireworks which is pretty cool. I just finished up my fourth week here in Baltimore at the Dr. Goggins lab, which focuses on early detection of pancreatic cancer. In addition to all the lab work that I mentioned previously in my prior blog post, some interesting things have happened over the last two weeks. For one thing, Dr. Peretz visited my lab! It was a pleasure to show her around both my lab as well as the enormous Johns Hopkins Hospital. I would like to thank Dr. Peretz for lunch which was very tasty by the way.
On the same day that Dr. Peretz visited me, my lab had a lab meeting to discus a recently published Nature article. Surprisingly, my particular lab does not have meetings often, however, my PI believed that this particular article was worthy to talk extensively about. The article was pertinent to the research that is currently being conducted in the lab so they wanted to talk about their particular methods as well as scrutinize certain elements of the article. This particular article talked about a potential revolutionary bio-marker for pancreatic cancer. In an extremely brief summary, the researchers found using a myriad of tests and experiments (the article and the supporting data was 24 pages long) that in patients with pancreatic cancer there is an over-expression of a protein glypican-1 within the extra-cellular exosomes found in the the serum of the blood. This article was very complicated and quite difficult for me to read but I am proud to say that I was able to read through all of it and understand a good portion of the article and consequently I understood a decent amount of what the PI and post-docs of my lab were talking about. It was extremely interesting to see them critique this article. The way that they read the article was immensely different from the way I read the article. They questioned things that I took for granted and found holes within the article's argument that I would never catch. Watching this aspect of a lab is a vital part of my overall experience in the lab and made me think more about how I will read scientific articles/experiments in the future.
In addition to the very interesting lab meeting, I got the opportunity observe more of the clinical aspect of the research. I received the wonderful opportunity to sit in a physician's meeting. In this meeting all of the physicians gathered around and looked at different patient's endoscopic ultrasounds (EUS) in order to determine how progressed a tumor is including if it is considered locally advanced, and whether it is resectable or not. An EUS involves the insertion of a probe into the body and then uses sound waves to create images of internal organs and specific blood vessels. One of the main factors that influence whether a tumor is resectable or unresectable is whether it has arterial involvement. If a tumor is involved with a artery (the pancreas is surrounded by important blood vessels) there is more of a possibility to leave behind a positive margin (meaning leaving behind cancerous tissue) and it makes surgery too risky to proceed with it. A common option is to administer neoadjuvent treatment usually including chemotherapy and radiation to hopefully turn the tumor into a resectable one. It was amazing to see the group of physicians look at images of an EUS and solve what is going on inside that person's body like it was challenging puzzle. I really enjoyed observing them even if it was hard for me to follow what exactly was going on in the EUS imaging.
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| Picture of an EUS that depicts the pancreas |
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