Joe Yuan @ The Mason Lab: Post #2: The Importance of Research

Why do men and women around the world dedicate their entire lives to the laboratory in the hopes of discovering something significant? Because the world of medicine and technology needs research in order to prosper. 

Before you can do research, you must do research.

My short 9 days of experience at the Mason lab has truly inspired me, and educated me on just how hard researchers have to work to get any sort of result regardless of success or failure. So far, I have ran a maxi prep, cultured canine spleen cells, counted a metric ton of cells, sat through the extremely convoluted operation of flow cytometry, and faced the existential crisis that is cleaning the water bath. 

The water bath wasn't cleaned out for 3 months. 3 months.  

But that was last week, lets take a look at my schedule on this week (week 2):

1. Stain then flow K562 cells to determine antibody (anti PD-1)  binding
2. Figure out how to sequence the variable heavy and light regions of the anti PD-1
3. Learn the process of immunohistochemistry
4. Find a plausible way to caninize the Fc region of the anti PD-1
5. learn to use the cryostat
6. Check T-cell proliferation to prove that PDL-1 is restricting T-cell proliferation
7. Visit Niko (Bernese)  and Ti (Shepherd) at the hospital and show them some love
8. Characterize the anti PD-1 through a antibody testing kit

The Flow Machine

Week 2 was frustrating. Despite successfully illustrating the binding of anti PD-1 with the K562s and flow, our major experiment determining the PD-1 effect of limiting cell proliferation essentially failed. We saw results that did not align with our hypothesis, and can even be inscribed as the complete opposite of what we were expecting. So next week (3), We are going to attempt to sequence the antibody with PCR, and reattempt our experiment to determine the optimal dilution of PD-L1 in our future experiments. Here's to hoping all of that goes well, because this could be a huge step forward in canine cancer treatments. So all in all I am excited to keep pushing forward, regardless of how difficult it may be. 

I hope everyone is having a fantastic summer so far!

Joe Yuan