Week 4 - Jon Albo

My fourth week consisted of a continuation of my clinical experiences in lymphoma and stem cell transplants but I met with two labs regarding their research and identifying potential collaborations with my lab back in Ithaca.

For my clinical experiences, I focused again this week on shadowing the stem cell transplants morning rounds and outpatient clinic under Dr. van Besien. For patients getting stem cell transplants, they have multiple appointments to plan and set up their treatment plan and then are admitted to the hospital to receive treatment and for observation. This was the first week that a patient I had been seeing in outpatient was admitted to the hospital to receive their CAR-T cell treatment. It is super cool to see patients from the start and hopefully to the finish of them receiving treatments to beat and cure their cancer. It's nice to see how quickly they progress and follow them throughout many of the stages of their treatment so I can better understand areas that can be improved for the patients. For inpatient rounds, I continued to shadow Dr. Mayer and the PA's and it's always exciting to see the patients get better and have great responses to their treatments. Some of the patients I see in inpatient rounds are also Dr. van Besien's patients so we discuss them when I go down to outpatient clinic.

For research, I met with Dr. Ferrarone who is a post doc in Dr. Harold Varmus's lab. Their lab focuses a lot on adenocarcinomas driven by mutations in the gene encoding the epidermal growth factor receptor. To evaluate this, they have traditionally always used 2D cancer models but as of last year, they started working with 3D cancer models. Dr. Ferrarone and I discussed the differences in information they can obtain from these models and the novel findings they've been able to discover in less than a year by switching from 2D to 3D. He mentioned that there's not currently a good way to do these screens in a high-throughput manner and with the plates my lab back in Ithaca has been working on, this is a promising collaboration for both of us. He shared over their protocol and I'm excited to see if we're able to grow these 3D cancer models on our devices when I get back to Ithaca. Additionally for research, I set up shadowing opportunities for next week with researchers in the precision medicine institute to learn their current high-throughput methods for screening with their protocols and am excited to learn how their work benefits the hospital. We're hoping that there may be areas for improvement that our devices can benefit.

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