Week 5 - Jon Albo

This week started off with the usual clinic hours on Monday seeing patients needing stem cell transplants and finally admitting a few patients who had been waiting treatment. I learned a bit about some ongoing CAR-T clinical trials that the hospital is participating in which was exciting to learn about from that point of view.

Throughout the rest of the week, I started working in Dr. Elemento's precision medicine lab with a few of the technicians, post-docs, and researchers to understand how they're working to develop high-throughput drug screening assays. This week, they taught me how to grow and passage 3D organoids from various tumors and the many considerations they have to consider when growing the tumors. They taught me how their pipetting robots can run the drug screens or be used to extract DNA from saliva or blood samples. I learned a lot about their ongoing and upcoming projects and how they're working on tackling some of their current difficulties. One part that was super cool was learning how to isolate monocytes from healthy human blood donors so that those cells can be used in a co-culture with organoids to test other drugs that are directed at immune cells.

I've had a great time in the city but I'm excited to get back to Ithaca and start working further on the research projects in our lab over there.

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