Week 5- Zuzanna

This week I observed many cancer patients in the clinic and learned about various stages of disease. Some of the patients were in remission and coming in for checkups which were successful, but some were coming back with severe disease. I think the most stressful thing I learned about was a person who had tumors on a transplanted kidney, making chemo and immunotherapy a difficult option due to the immune suppressing medicines they must stay on to keep the kidney. There are not as many treatment options that would work well without an additional risk.

I also saw some facial reconstructive surgeries this week which was very interesting. I watched an osteomy on a person's upper and low jaws. It was the first bone-related procedure I saw as the previous ones had been soft tissue related, so it was crazy to see them just saw and break a solid structure like a jaw in half. It was interesting to see the techniques they used to align the jaws back into place with a template for the screws, and also use a 3D printed model of the person's jaw for references. The most interesting part was when they placed BMP, a material to stimulate bone growth, between reassembled structures, as I had learned about BMP in my materials class but had never seen this in action. While I am not directly working with bone growth in my research, I am working with biomaterials, so it was interesting to see how they clinically implement biomaterials and the preferences clinicians have for their uses. It was very interesting to watch these things I learn about in action. 

In lab I have continued to analyze some organoid imaging data to optimize culture conditions for cancer organoids. We are trying to figure out the best way to image organoids within a test tube using various imaging techniques like CT.