Week 4: Ben

Today, I started formulating ideas on what research project I should do as part of the Immersion Term program requirement. Because my thesis project involves investigating the crosstalk between pancreatic islets and vasculature, I wanted to see if co-culturing the two in a 3D context alters the function of the islets. With that, my plan is to isolate islets from mice, disassociate them, and re-aggregate them with different densities of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC). Endothelial cells secrete out basement membrane components such as laminin and collagen IV that directly interact with the pathways that mediate glucose response and insulin secretion function of islets. That being said, I am hypothesizing that by increasing the cellular density of the HUVECs in these re-aggregated islets will bolster the insulin secretion capacity, which I will measure using glucose stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS). In order to execute this experiment, I am currently coordinating with Dr. Shahin Rafii's research group so that I can use their HUVEC reserves and with the Alonso lab so I can source mice that I can extract islets from.

This week, I wanted to expand on my clinical experiences, so I shadowed in the urology department. Here, I observed a prostatectomy and a cystectomy, which is a full prostate and bladder removal, respectfully. In both cases, there were cancerous lesions. With the prostatectomy, the prostate and the urinary tract were removed, so the urinary tract from the bottom of the bladder and the urethra had to be stitched together. For the cystectomy, the bladder, prostate, and ureters connected to the two kidneys were removed. In this case, the ureters were funneled to an external bag that acted as a bladder, in which urine is collected. In addition, lymph nodes were collected to test if the cancers in the two cases were metastatic, but there was doubt it would be given both cases were early stage. One thing that was cool to see about these surgeries was that they both were robot-assisted using the DaVinci robotic surgery system. It was really cool to see it in action, and I learned that it has revolutionized performing urology surgery, as previously, surgeons would poke holes into the abdomen and thread materials through these holes, which has lots of room for error and would make these surgeries extremely long. Robotics has sped up this process, and made these kind of surgeries efficient to perform.

Moving to next week, I will move forth with my experimental plan, and also try to see if I can get into bariatric surgeries so that I can compare the different clinics that I had observed.