Week 6 -- Bunyarit

I attended the meeting called “Prostate Cancer Working Group Meeting”. In the meeting, many doctors from various departments conducting research on prostate cancer attended and discussed ongoing research. For this week meeting, they presented their project for grant application, and after each presentation was done, questions and comments were discussed within the group. There are 5 project candidates, and from 5 projects, two projects really impressed me. The first one was to generate antibody, ⁹⁸Zr-antibody, for bioimaging of prostate gland. The motivation of this project was predicated on the reason that biopsy from TRUS or MRI normally give false negative result because the way that we collects specimen for further analysis is randomly selected from tissue. Consequently, the researchers would like to generate ⁹⁸Zr-antibody to navigate the location for collecting sample. The reason I like this project is because it is pragmatic research and if it succeeds, it will be transformative not only in US but also other parts of the world. The second project in which I am interested is about the use of novel radiation therapy to eliminate prostate cancer with minimally damaging normal tissue. They mentioned that they can use high dose of radiation but less harmful by resting on the concept that prostate cancer has low alpha/beta coefficient when compared to other cancers. Interestingly, they invented mathematic model to calculate probability of damaging surrounding tissues. In addition to the meeting, I was assigned to collect prostate sample that was removed after robotic prostatectomy. For this responsibility, I had to divide the removed sample into 3 parts, which are prostate gland, lymp node, and fat tissue, and sent them to pathology lab to determine what type of cancer is and where the location of cancer is. In the event that cancer is found in lymph node, radiation therapy should be a further step after surgery. Apart from the meeting and my duty in Dr. Tewari's lab, I spent most of my time doing research project to analyze collected data in hope that it will be finished within next week.