July 3, 2018, Filed Under: 2018, cancer, reflections, researchReflecting on Research Hi, I’m Josh, a rising sophomore at Johns Hopkins University majoring in Biomedical Engineering and a part of the UT Austin BME CURes Cancer REU. Although our lab is currently in the “set up phase” of my project, much progress has been made. Our experiment itself is two-fold: part wet lab, part dry lab, and I have learned to enjoy the breaks that each one gives the other. This is the type of analysis our lab performs where we take the percentage of cells that are alive after a certain dose of treatment and fit them to a curve using Matlab. My project involves using the process of EMT (Epithelial to Mesenchymal transition) to predict the effect of matrix stiffness on chemotherapy resistance in mammalian cancer cells. Like I mentioned, we are currently in the setup phase: seeding, lasing, dosing, and performing live/dead assays in order to test the effect of a wider range of matrix stiffnesses on chemotherapy resistance using Dose/Response curves. In these pictures, we are seeding 5 mM gels in preparation to dose and eventually perform a live/dead assay on them. Our lab hopes to develop a mechanistic model that predicts the effect matrix stiffness has on drug resistance due to a change in the proportion of mesenchymal cells. This can be detected through confocal imaging by marking certain transcription factors like YAP. This lab has taught me much more than to follow protocols. It has given me the ability to be independent and understand that I enjoy exploring new topics I am not caught up on in the scientific community. I am suddenly gaining critical skills like reading published papers, and without the great flexibility of my mentors and PI, I would never be able to gain these tools that I will definitely need down the road. Excited to see what results the month of July holds! -Joshua Krachman, Johns Hopkins University
