Week 4 - Sara

This week was slow in general. I had clinic on Tuesday and Thursday. Most of the cases were just basic follow-up visits. Nothing extraordinary happened, which is a good thing since that means the patients are doing well and getting better.

On Wednesday, I followed Dr. Bookvar (Ryan's mentor) into neuro-surgery. I first watched a spine-decompression surgery in the morning. I couldn't see a lot of it, but essentially some of the spine was removed and screws and rods were put in. The rest of the cavities was filled in with the patient's bones.

The second surgery was more interesting as it was a craniotomy. The patient has a mass in the right side of the brain, but it was not known whether the mass is malignant or not. A section of the head was opened and the skull was removed. Pieces of the tumor was sent to surgical pathology for analysis, and it was determined to be a high-grade neoplasm (aka glioblastoma malforme). To ensure that the tumor is complete removed, the surgeon actually resected the brain to the brain stem. It was amazing to see the brain, as well as to visualize how the tumor differ from normal tissue (the operation was done under microscope and could be seen on TV). All in all, it was nice to see a crainotomy since so many students were involved in the neurology department.

On Friday, I finally ran my first experiment. To recap, I am looking at tissue factor (TF) expression in prostate cancer cells. I only have one of my cell line (PC3 - a metastatic prostate cancer cell line), so I ran these cells with anti-TF antibodies and flow cytometry. The results showed that the cells were positive, but I would repeat the experiments to confirm (Since there were problems with the cytometer and the cells were left out for 2 hours). I am still waiting for my benign prostate cancer cell line for comparisons (my hypothesis is that TF is expressed on metastatic prostate cancer cell as this is shown in breast and bladder cancer). I only received my breast cancer cell line on Thursday, so I couldn't use them as a positive control. When I have all these cancer cell lines ready, I will run another experiment to confirm. When my hypothesis is confirmed, I can spike patient blood to see if TF can be used as a marker to identify circulating tumor cell.