Today I got to get more hands on in the lab. The first thing that I got to do was go into the tissue culture lab which is a room full of incubators keeping cancer cells alive at normal body temperatures. One of the MDs explained that after extracting cancer cells from a patient in the OR, they are taken to the tissue lab where they are incubated and cultured for growth. Upon growth, they are injected into the lab mice where active cancer growth is observed to be treated with different types of test drugs using computational biology. I got to observe colorectal cancer cells under a microscope while assorting them in different petri dishes under the fume hood. The second thing that I got to do in the lab today was extract DNA from the collected cancer cells. It was interesting to note that extracting the DNA was not at all an arduous task. And yesterday, when I got to observe one of the MDs deal with buffer solutions, I realized that this was the aftermath to what I got to do today. Essentially, to discover the proteins in the RNA of the cancer lines, they first extract the DNA from the cancer cell lines which is converted into RNA, then placed in a buffer solution where, in a two day process, we can determine the existing proteins and pick different drugs to test on these proteins to see which drug weakens them most. But after extracting the DNA and using the incubator to cultivate it, I got to put it on a small slide and observe its architecture under a microscope. It was interesting to see the stark differences but also the subtle similarities between the different cancer cells under the microscope. I got to observe some cancer cells that had been in the incubator for weeks and were flourishing while I also got to observe fresh cancer cells, not yet grown. I also got to observe colorectal cancer cells and kidney cancer cells and noted the differences between those two as well.
Today I also got to take a paraffin block containing cancer cell tissue, slice it, soak it, and put it in a slide for analysis. What I got to do was dye the sliced piece of cancer tissue so that its architecture and makeup is observable under a microscope. And then it can be delivered to the tissue culture lab to be kept in an incubator so that we can visibly see its makeup and whether it is primarily comprised of organoids or fibroblasts. What Dr. Hsu came in and explained to me was that fibroblasts often grow in cancer cell tissue and overtake the organoids inhibiting their growth. This is a big problem when it comes to developing cancer cell lines because the cancer cell lines aren’t pure enough to evaluate for research, and even when they try and purify the lines to allow more pure cancer cells to grow, the fibroblasts still invade the organoids and often make it difficult to see the organoids. What’s nice though is that the makeup of organoids vs. fibroblasts are very different. Fibroblasts are long, weed-like organisms whereas organoids look like clumps of cells. It’s very difficult to get a pure cancer cell line of organoids, so Dr. Hsu has assigned Sarah and I the task of constructing pure organoid cancer cell lines. It’s difficult because as soon as you cut up the cancer tissue and attempt to grow it in separate petri dishes, we create a comfortable environment for the fibroblasts to grow also. So starting today we began to work in the tissue lab to design a procedure to properly construct organoid cancer cell lines without fibroblasts getting in the way. What Dr. Hsu did explain to me though is that the reason why not much research has been diverted to being able to construct these organoid cancer cells without the fibroblasts is that since fibroblasts grow with the growth of cancer cell lines when injected into mice, this in fact helps research how to treat the cancer considering the growth of other cells also. Fibroblasts are key in determining what types of drugs are potent enough to defeat cancer cells because they grow inside of the human body also.
