Joseph Miller - Week 3-4

Week 3:

This week Dr.Pannullo was out of town but before she left set me up for a series of meetings with various medical physicists.  The interesting thing about this was that for the last 3-4 years, my career path has been to become an MP.  However, after speaking with the med physicists at NYPH, I'm beginning to think this is not the career I truly want.  The attractive part of being an MP was that they spend half their time with patients and the other half on research.  In my ideal world, the time spent with patients would be like an unending well of potential research projects and ideas to investigate for the betterment of patient care.  However, in practice, the research being conducted is, to me anyways, less than impressive.  My impression is that the patient care is really closer to 85-90% of the MP's time and the remaining 10-15% is spent doing important, but never the less somewhat marginal, research.  Still, it was great to refine my idea about this potential path and that was invaluable.  The rest of the week I spent reading up on magnetic resonance spectroscopy and ways to utilize its capabilities for measuring response to therapy.  I think I've made some good progress and the field is actually very exciting.  I am thinking that it could be great for publishing.

Week 4:

Susan came back this week so I saw more patients with her and spoke with her about my ideas in MRS.  She's very enthusiastic about it and sent me her previous publications on the topic.  I had to make a trip back to Ithaca for a DARPA meeting and two other research related meetings with a couple  professors.  I am trying to bring Amit Lal into NYC to partner up with Susan and establish a dry lab in the city.  It seems promising and it would really make the rest of my years here more efficient.  One particular thing I became interested in during my research was this protein PTEN.  Apparently the gene that codes for this protein has long been though of as controlling a cell's capacity for DNA repair.  Lately, I read a few studies that seem to indicate that it's not so much the DNA repair but the cell's growth check-points.  When PTEN is repressed, cells with good DNA repair capabilities but poor checkpoints are characterized as radioresistent.  Whereas, when there are good check points and PTEN is at appropriate levels, but the DNA repair mechanisms are bad, the cell is radiosensitive.  This is interesting because currently certain types of tumors do not respond well to radiotherapy but this implies PTEN-based drugs can be applied to improve the effectiveness of the radiotherapy.  More on this as I learn.