Student Research at Duke

Since my lab works with animals, I did a lot of reading and observing this week because I don’t have the proper certification yet to help with the experiments. My lab does a lot of testing of drug delivery on tumors. They use liposomes which are small lipid bubbles that contain a cancer drug inside them. The liposomes release the drugs inside of them under specific conditions. Some of the most common kinds are temperature sensitive. To test how well they work, they inject tumors in the back right leg of the mice. The liposomes are administered through the tail vein of the mice while their legs are submerged in a water bath at a certain temperature. They have finished most of these studies but they are using some of the leftover mice to track the temperature of the tumor over an hour in the water bath. The mice are anesthetized first and then temperature probes are inserted in two different parts of the tumor. The mice are then inserted in a plastic cylinder with two slits on the side so that their legs stick out. Here is a picture of the of the water bath:rnrn rnrnThe cylinder is clipped to one of the horizontal pieces of plastic so that only the leg with the tumor is under water.rnrnrnrnrnrnrnrnThe project that I will be working on next week is analyzing DCE-MRI scans to see if there are trends between the signal of the contrast agent in tumors and the outcome of the patients. This is a picture of me with Ben, a post-doc in the lab showing me what to do on the computer:rnrn

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