Week 4 – Amy

I have really enjoyed learning about CAR-T cells and their translation to the clinic from both my research and clinical mentor. They both have extensive knowledge on the subject but their differing points of views have given me a fuller picture of the subject, which I feel would be lacking if I only had one mentor.

Clinical Observation: This week Dr. Curran gave part 1 of his CAR-T lecture for the fellows in the department. I was lucky enough to attend and learned a lot about the history of CAR-T cells and those that are FDA approved. In future lectures, he hopes to dive deeper into toxicity and why CAR-T cells are largely ineffective against solid tumors (a subject very relevant to my research at Cornell University). All though we normally meet with patients undergoing CAR-T therapies, this week I got to witness my first T-cell transfusion. Additionally, this week there was a child who is participating in a Phase I clinical trial for an engineered T-cell receptor. It was interesting to learn about the procedure concerning Phase I clinical trials and to listen to the physicians and nurses discuss some of the unexpected symptoms that arose.

Research: This week I continued to expand the SynNotch/CAR-T transduced Jurkat cells. We will sort these tomorrow so that we have a pure population of transduced cells. I performed another PCR and Gibson cloning to put our sequences of interest into a smaller vector, as a smaller vector is optimal for transducing primary T-cells. This past week, Dr. Scheinberg gave a talk to the lab about cancer immunotherapies, with an emphasis on CAR-T cells, explaining where the field was headed and what is currently done in the clinic. I found this a particularly useful discussion and followed up on several of the papers that were discussed. Another major experiment completed this week, was a time course study concerning p-selectin expression. P-selectin is the ligand for the SynNotch receptor the lab is using. We performed a western blot and flow to analyze results.

NYC Activities: The last weekend, we completed seeing the major museums in NYC with the American Museum of Natural History and the 9/11 Memorial Museum. We finished up the weekend with the Empire State Building.

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