Week 7: Allison

 This week, we were going to set up another coculture experiment to see if different activation methods could be used to overcome radiation-induced exhaustion of T cells, and we were going to add triple negative breast cancer cells to the coculture setup along with the glioblastoma cells we used in our previous experiment. We set up the experiment last Friday so the T cells would be activated on Monday, but when we were counting the T cells on Monday, we found that most had died, and the surviving cells did not appear to be activated. We had to pivot our experimental plan, and ended up culturing the surviving T cells in media with stimulatory cytokines for a few extra days to encourage proliferation. We ended up with enough T cells to set up a small, imaging-based coculture experiment that is ongoing and will end on Monday. While we won't be able to perform flow cytometry as originally planned, we stained the T cells and cancer cells and will be able to track differences in cell proliferation and interaction over the 5 day coculture using an Incucyte that will capture images every 3 hours.

I was also able to shadow Dr. Kathryn Beal this week, who is a radiation oncologist specializing in brain cancers and metastases. I saw her meet with several patients, ranging from diagnosis and radiosurgery planning, to radiosurgery followup appointments, and check-ins to discuss MRI results. It was very eye-opening to be on this side of patient care, as I've spent most of my summer shadowing in pathology. Being in the room with patients and seeing symptoms of the cancer and treatments firsthand was definitely an experience I'll remember, and the patient experience during treatment will be at the forefront of my mind when I return to Ithaca and resume my research on new immunotherapy treatments. I toured the rooms where radiosurgery is performed, and it was very cool to see the machines used on actual patients after seeing many mice with glioblastoma irradiated over the past several weeks. I will be shadowing Dr. Beal again next week, and I am very excited to see more patient-facing care.