Monday, June 25, 2012

Week 1 sidd

Along the edges of upper east Manhattan where the upper crust resides in vogue and where a cereal box is sold for a whopping 8$ are a set of hospitals where ground breaking clinical trials, research and surgeries are happening completely oblivious to the honking and cacophony of NYC traffic . Apart from getting my 6 mile run in central park every day, I have been running from pillar to post to get myself oriented to the huge hospital and my research project.  It was very different to step out the first day in a formal attire quite not the scenario in Ithaca as I was galavanting in my summer shorts ever since the sun started blazing. Dr. Yi Wang and Rebecca Cramer gave us a brief orientation after which all of us disbursed to meet our respective mentors.  I was matched with Dr. Joseph Osborne, MD from the department of nuclear medicine.  I couldn't meet him on Monday as he was in a conference at Florida. Instead I met with the research manager (Sagit Goldenberg) who is in-charge  of the project. I was thrilled to learn that I would be working on a clinical trial for prostate cancer diagnosis.  If I had to summarize the project in two lines: patients undergoing prostatectomy would be pre injected with radio labeled antibodies against prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA) 5 days before the surgery. Surgically removed prostate tumor would then be imaged using positron emission tomography (PET) and multi-photon microscopy (MPM) to do a radio/path correlation to identify the foci of prostate cancer. Since the first patient is scheduled for the 20th of June, I spent the time helping a grad student (Kofi Deh) who works for Dr. Osborne. Since the imaging technique that would be eventually used for imaging ex vivo prostate tumor could be gleaned from the small animal imaging methods, I learnt how to use the PET scanner in the imaging facility at Weill Cornell Medical Center. He was imaging the mice with human tumor xenografts injected with prostate cancer cells LnCAP. I also happened to attend the meeting with experienced doctors that work on prostate cancer to discuss the course of the trial. On the whole the first week at Weill cornell has been super exciting. In the following week I am looking forward to the first patient participating in the trial and witnessing few prostatectomy  in the OR.   I also attended the Circulating Tumor Cell (CTC) seminar by Dr. Peter Kuhn and it was really exciting to know the several facets of mathematical modeling that could be applied for determining the probability of CTCs from a specific tumor type to metastasize to a particular secondary site.  I also happened to attend the group meeting of Dr. Neil Bander, a pioneer in the field of prostate cancer and got to learn the work that his lab does on prostate cancer circulating tumor cells and therapy. Apart from the clinical exposure that I would be gaining this summer it would be such a rewarding experience to meet with living legends and stalwarts in the field of cancer research and observing them in close quarters.  Well if you go to Disney land you don't spend the whole day with pirates of the Caribbean! On similar lines I think summer immersion is just not about being in the OR and watching cool surgeries. 

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