Week 1 (Randi)

Hey guys! I'm glad to hear everyone's having a good time at project :)

So for my senior project I'm working at the Lerner Research Institute at Cleveland Clinic's Main Campus. I am in the Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine department (the same department as Nikolai for any STEMM people out there) in the Rich lab. The Rich lab focuses mainly on a type of brain cancer called Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM). This is the same cancer that killed Ted Kennedy, for those of you who keep up with current events. Without therapy, patients with GBM usually die within 3 months, and even with the best treatment less than 10% survive up to 5 years.

Many experts believe that the main reason for this huge mortality rate is because GBM cells resist radiation. Many cancer cells actually function like stem cells (called Cancer Stem Cells, or CSC). The formal definition of CSCs is: "the ability to undergo self-renewal and developmental potential to recapitulate all the cell types found in a given tissue." In other words, CSCs are tumor initiating cells. For each tumor, there is a small number of CSCs and a large number of regular cancer cells, but the problem is that radiation/chemo kills the normal cells but not the stem cells. Therefore, when you irradiate, you leave the cells that can recreate the tumor. Obviously, that's a problem. Also, surgery doesn't usually work because the cancer metastasizes in the brain, which is really dangerous to operate on and it's really tough to get out the entire tumor.

So, the lab is trying to better understand GSCs in order to figure out why they resist radiation. If you can figure out why they don't die, you can potentially eliminate this factor, allowing radiation to work. What most people have found is that multiple aspects of the microenvironment help them survive.

So far this week I have mostly been watching a learning. I helped out some with a flow cytometry (uses florescence of the cells to count survival rates) and other experiments. I also have gone to a number of talks, including presentations of other lab techs and post-docs projects (the lab is really big, with about 15 people, so these presentations are a great chance for people to keep up with what their colleagues are working on). I also saw a presentation by Jeff Rosen, a famous researcher of breast cancer stem cells. Though it can get really confusing, I feel I have learned a lot and will continue to learn more as the weeks progress.

Next week I am also starting my own project, which I'm really excited about. I'll elaborate more next time.