Week 3 : Adil

The third week started with attending the MDC tumor board. Doctors from different departments discussed breast cancer cases and came up with treatment plans for each case. One case was particularly interesting - a middle aged male patient was diagnosed with a tumoral mass in his chest. Doctors reviewed his imaging and radiology reports and finalized a seed localized lumpectomy as the treatment plan. Later in the week I shadowed Dr. Newman in the clincic for two patient sessions. These were new cases and Dr. Newman walked them through their treatment plan - localized lumpectomies followed by radiation therapy. I later shadowed Dr. Newman in the OR. I saw five surgeries - two mastectomies , one of which was followed by breast reconstruction and three lumpectomies. The lumpectomies were quite distinct from each other- first was direct removal of a hardened mass through a physical inspection of the breast, second was a seed localized lumpectomy and third was a wire localized bilateral lumpectomy. Finally I attended the 15th ICSBCS didactic lecture by Dr. Mark Robson. Dr. Robson discussed his recent work in treating breast cancers with high rates of genetic predisposition. In the lab, we finally pooled our samples and sent them for sequencing since the QC report for TCR library came back good. I also spent some time preprocessing tumor RNAseq datasets and prepping them for downstream analysis.