Week 6: Orren Shachaf

This week, I had the opportunity to shadow a new clinician, Dr. Dylan Bennett, who specializes in the non-surgical treatment of acute, overuse, and chronic musculoskeletal injuries. While in the clinic, I observed an ultrasound-guided injection of hyaluronic acid for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis. Additionally, I observed a patient who had polio as a child and, as a result, lost function of her left arm; her x-ray was particularly interesting, as the shoulder was extremely slumped and the humerus appeared dislocated from the glenoid, and the length of the humerus was noticeably thin from underuse. Research wise, this week was focused on more staining and imaging of histological samples—I imaged human patient samples that I had stained last week (H&E, Masson’s Trichrome), and I scored each sample for presence of fibrotic tissue. Additionally, I worked further on optimizing an immunohistochemistry protocol for staining urokinase plasminogen activator surface receptor (uPAR) for sections of mouse knees from prior single hindlimb immobilization studies. I am looking forward to next week, when I will hopefully be able to stain the human samples for uPAR and, subsequently, be able to correlate fibrosis, senescence, and patient stiffness!