Student Research at Duke

Although I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience doing research this summer, and I hope to continue with it as an undergrad, I don’t see myself going in to research as a career. I don’t think I’m patient enough for the slow pace of it. I now realize how many things have to come together to finally finish a project and get published. While it is cool to always have more questions and have more to research, I think I would rather have a specific project to work on once it is ready to be marketed so there can be closure.

I think I want to work in the biotech industry after undergrad and then maybe go back to school to get an MBA or Masters. I like being a team leader and organizing projects and events. I feel like it will be possible to move up the ladder in industry faster than I would be able to in research. It would be great to get a PhD and cure cancer but I realize that there are so many people that are so much more passionate about biology and medical research than I am so it’s probably not the right career for me. I hope to have an internship in industry some time before I graduate so I can see if a career in that direction is better for me.

I’ve almost finished creating all of the ROIs on the MRIs. We tried to start the analysis last week but the data is x, y, t, z instead of x, y, z, t. We’ll have to write a program to convert it. I also had to get dicominfo for all of the patients so we would know what time each slice was taken. Ben printed out a graph for one of the patients and the curve looked better with evenly spaced points then with the actual time points so we’ll have to figure out why that is. We’re meeting with someone this week to help write the program so hopefully we’ll finally get started with the analysis!

In other news, we had a Howard Hughes bbq on 4th of July which turned out great. Tessa and I went to the baseball game for the fireworks later and that was fun.

I found each of the presentations, the movie, and the article very interesting. I’m not going to go into detail about what they were all about because you can read that in the blogs of my peers. The main thing that this has made me think about is “What is the goal of research?”. Is it to become well known for your work? Is it to receive the most grant money? Is it to publish the most papers? To me, it seems like the answer of most of these questions should be no. Scientists should be doing research because they want to learn more about how the world works or make improvements in medicine. Unfortunately, everything has to revolve around funding, and while trying to get grants it seems like many researchers start to cut corners and they forget the original goal. If it wasn’t so difficult to get government funding and grants, then scientists would probably be able to focus more of their time and energy on their research.

For the past few weeks, I have been circling regions of interest (ROIs) on DCE (dynamic contrast enhanced)-MRIs of sarcomas. The patients were injected with a contrast agent before the MRI was performed. My research question for the summer is to look at the DCE-MRI data (such as the graph of signal strength from the tumor vs. time) to identify prognostic factors that can determine treatment efficacy. The actual images are from about 10 years ago so we know how the patients responded to treatment. Hopefully we will find some correlation between the DCE-MRI data and the results of treatment.

I was looking at the website of the Hyperthermia Treatment Program at the Duke Cancer Center today and I found this video that was on CBS Evening news last year. The research that is being done in my lab has led to the use of hyperthermia in clinical trials for patients with cancer at Duke! It’s really cool to see that the research in this lab can have such a great influence on cancer treatment! Here is a link to the Video:

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/videoplayer/newVid/small_player/vplayer2.shtml?id=1515322n

And here is a link for the article:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/19/eveningnews/main1515618.shtml

Dr. Dewhirst is out of town this week so I decided to interview Ashley Manzoor, a PhD student in the Medical Physics program who is going to be my main mentor this summer. She went to Georgia Tech for undergrad because she got a full ride there. Originally, she was going to be an English major and go in to Journalism. Ashley wanted more of a challenge and took an Into to Nuclear Engineering course, and fell in love with it. She ended up Majoring in nuclear and radiological engineering. She got job one summer at the CDC in the Radiological Studies branch. There she met lots of health physicists who told her to go into medical physics.rnrnrnrnShe’s currently in the first Medical Physics class at Duke. She also considered UCLA, Vandy, and Florida. Coming here was a risk because Duke’s program is not yet accredited. She liked Duke because the program is connected to the Medical School unlike the other schools. Medical Physics is clinically oriented field so Duke seems like it works better.rnrnI asked her if there are any classes that she wishes that she had taken as an undergrad. She said “MATLAB!” I was surprised to hear this because I remember thinking that I would never need it when I had to take EGR 53 last fall. Between what I have seen in the lab so far and what I learned in BME 8 last semester, I have realized what a great tool MATLAB is. She also wished she had paid more attention to her circuits and signal processing classes. She said she chose to work in Dr. Dewhirst’s lab because the lab is so diverse and it brings together so many different fields, such as biology, BME, physics, and medicine.rnShe is now applying to the MD/PhD program at Duke. She wants to go in to radiation oncology. She believes that a background in Medical Physics will really benefit cancer patients. During her first year of grad school she had intensive coursework. At the end of the year tshe had to take a 10 hour qualifying exam. This past year (her 2^nd year) she took a few more classes and started learning how to do things in the lab. There is a lot more writing involved in science than I thought there was. She said that Dr. Dewhirst has everyone in the lab review articles to get an experience. He also gives grad students the opportunity to help write things for journals.rnrnShe said it’s really important to be passionate about your work. To get funding for your research you need to be excited about it and be able to sell how great it is.

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

I’m having trouble getting this to work so I’ll post more tomorrow! (it keeps deleting everything I write)

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