Week 5 - Young Hye

This week I mostly spent time on collaborative lab work at Dr Mittal's lab. Last weekend, I was in Ithaca and picked up all the invasion assay stuff. Tuesday, we drew blood on two mice, isolated neutrophils, and set up the assay. We initially wanted to have at least 5 million neutrophils/mL, but from blood of two mice we got about 1 million/ml only. It was a bit of disappointment, and we'll probably need to repeat the experiments with more blood and thus more neutrophils.

And on Tuesday I also went to brain tumor board with Liz and Ryan. It was the first real tumor board that I've attended here, since I've only seen a case tumor board presented at a conference, and it went by really fast. Since I'm totally new to brain tumor, it was a bit hard to catch up on what the doctors were saying, and while I was googling some of the terms that I couldn't understand, they were already on another patient. Surprisingly, Liz and Ryan said the doctors talked the most this week compared to previous ones, so I decided that I needed to attend tumor boards more often to catch up.

Also, I met up with Dr Vahdat to work on the project. This time, we searched DFS and OS of the patients. I looked up the social security death index to see if any of the patients whose information was missing was dead, so that we can at least get OS. Then I generated Kaplan-Meier plot using Prism, and lean patients had overall higher DFS and OS. Now I need to think how to expand upon the spreadsheet that I have of these patients, and I'll get to learn to pull up some histological slides and analyze the specimens.