Week 6 - Jon Albo

 It's crazy to think that immersion is over and it's already been 6 weeks. It feels like just yesterday we were all debating how many clothes to bring and how many suitcases we'd be allowed to take on the bus. Although one suitcase was enough for my clothes, I'm glad I had an extra duffle bag to bring some bagels back with me.

I came into this experience with very little expectations and not a clear path of what I wanted to learn and take away. I knew I wanted to make connections and meet different research labs in case we wanted to collaborate in the future, but other than that it was more or less an open slate. I chose to dive into learning about lymphoma and stem cell transplants since cancer research has always been interesting to me, but I've never worked anywhere where this was an option. Dr. Leonard and other lymphoma clinicians graciously took me under their wing and taught me an incredible amount about lymphoma and how patients are treated. I saw some patients that had very successful treatments from the beginning and other patients that had gone through multiple treatments with little to no success. I learned each of the clinicians in the department treat their patients and really learned how MD's make decisions. I have such a more comprehensive understanding how decisions are made for patients that wasn't an area I knew about. After working in lymphoma for a few weeks, Dr. Leonard connected me with Dr. van Besien to enable me to learn about stem cell transplants. Dr. van Besien was incredible at always including me and explaining every little detail to me. He didn't seem to care how much base knowledge I had or even if I remembered things, he was just excited to tell me everything he knew. The whole stem cell transplant team was really great and helpful and always went out of their way to set me up for success, which was surprising because I'm sure they get plenty of visitors. He taught me a lot about CAR-T cell therapy treatments, current clinical trials that they are working on, and where the field is headed which was super helpful to know.

Aside from working directly with my clinicians, I was also able to shadow some of the clinicians my peers were working under - Dr. Prince and Dr. Schwartz. I learned how to read MRI's from Dr. Prince and what exactly he was looking for when writing his reports. I got to watch Dr. Schwartz do two surgeries to remove tumors on the pineal gland which allowed me to see all of the biomedical devices and biomaterials they use in surgery.

For research, I unfortunately wasn't able to spend too much time in the lab but met with a couple of labs - Dr. Harold Varmus's lab and Dr. Olivier Elemento's lab. In Dr. Varmus's lab, I met with one of his students, Dr. Ferrarone, who explained their current work of growing spheroids to study lung cancer mutations. In Dr. Elementos lab, I was able to shadow a bunch of his students the best two weeks and grow my own colon cancer organoids. The images looked super cool to see how quickly they grew and I was glad to learn about their pipetting robots. They're hoping to grow patient cancer cells into organoids for high-throughput drug screening to determine which drugs will work the best for the patients. I'm super excited about their work and there is definitely overlap with my lab in Ithaca so hopefully we'll have some collaborations come out of it.

Overall, I'm super glad we had this experience and I really am surprised and so happy with the amount of knowledge I took away from it