Drug Effectiveness

Last Wednesday (December 19th, 2012),  I had my last internship in fall semester.

When I arrived, I met Eun Ji at the door, and she soon took me to the lab. Before we started we chatted for a while so we can know each other better. Eun Ji was a really approachable person. Although her English wasn't perfect, she was so amicable that I feel I could just talk to her on and on. She was relatively ne to Dr. Koffas' group and she was also a member of two other groups in RPI. Because she has a group meeting at 2, she assigned me a small task, and that was to  label all the chemicals, including where were they located in the lab in an excel file to help her work more efficiently. I was quite blown away by the variety of chemicals they had in the lab. There were over a hundred chemicals, not including those the lab people made them by  themselves, in the lab, and most of them I have never heard of. The names could be as simple as glucose and aluminum oxide to as complex as 3', 5'-dimethoxy-4'-hydroxyacetophenone, N,N'-Dicyclohexylcarbodiimide.

After Eun Ji was back, I followed her to the cell room where she showed me some cancer cells. I was so excited because I always wanted to see them! First, she showed me some normal skin cells. They were diamond shape and regular. Those cells are placed in a 96 wells plate where scientists could put a small portion of the cells in each well, give them different treatment, and compare the results together.

Then, I looked at the cancer cells, and not surprisingly, they grew irregularly. In this part of the lab, Eun Ji was testing the effectiveness of a potential drug. She divided the 96 well plates into 3 sections, each contained different kinds of cancer cells. Then, she divided each section into 3 smaller sections, each were giving different concentrations of drugs. Something like this:

She gave the cancer cells a specific dye (blue) that not only could stop them from growing but also make them easier for observation. Only the living cells would show the color blue, so after the cells were given treatments, we could know the effectiveness by observing how blue the well is (The bluer, the more living cells there were, the less effective the drug was).

Next, since all the living cells precipitated in the bottom of the wells, we could use a machine to suck out all the cell culture and dead cells, leaving only the blue living cells. Eun Ji then add another solution to the samples to wash off the blue dye. The solution would turn violet-pink as the dye was washed off. The samples was placed on a machine that works somehow like a cell culture roller that keeps a cell culture in motion in order for the cells to grow. The process would take about 30 min for all the dye to fully diffuse in the solution. The result follows the same principle: the darker the solution (more violet-pink color), the more living cells there are, so the less effective is the drug. After the dye comes off, we would put the plate in a spectrophotometry. A spectrophotometry works just like a spectrometer except it uses UV light instead of normal light, and the light transmits through 96 wells at once, so it gives us a more precise quantitative measurement of how many living cells there are.

While we were waiting for the dye to come off, we chatted a bit more. Eun Ji talked to me about the other 2 labs she was engaging in. One of them in which I thought was pretty interesting was that she is trying to find a drug that would prevent the fetus to get malaria if the mom has it. The drug would target the red blood cells that carry malaria parasites, blocking them before they transmit to the fetus through umbilical cord. As a biologist, Eun Ji said it was a challenge to her for that she now has to think in "chemistry way", deciding which molecule combing with which molecule would get the desired results. However, that's what science is about - not everything will yield the result you want, and you just have to keep trying. I found talking to her quite inspirational, and I shared my experience of talking about the Human Genome Project in class with her, too. Anyways, she told me that her newest drug has proved some effectiveness, and now she would need to find the right proportion of the formula so the drug won't kill the normal red blood cells as well. Working with Eun Ji was a very nice experience:)

The following two weeks are the winter vacation, so I won't be able to go to my internship. However, I am really excited when I come back:)