Week 1: Allison

 
Early this week, I was able to shadow experiments in both the Demaria and Vanpouille-Box labs, which included preparing glioblastoma cells for injection into mouse brains and processing breast cancer tumors from mice treated with combinations of immunotherapy and radiation for single-cell RNA sequencing. Earlier today, I saw collection of lymph nodes from mice who had repeated rechallenging of glioblastoma after initial treatment and survival but never redeveloped tumors. The T cells were harvested for in vitro culture to study their activation and cytokine production. I have learned that immunotherapy can be applied with radiation therapy to provide greater efficacy than either treatment alone, and work is being done to translate these findings to clinical practice. Eleana and I will be presenting our research and a project proposal at a joint lab meeting next week, so we have also been working on putting that together. I will also be starting clinical shadowing next week to see how breast cancer is diagnosed in patients, which I am very excited for!