Day 1

Today, since Dr. Hsu had to work in the clinic with patients, I did research about what Dr. Hsu actually does on a daily basis. Dr. Hsu pursued an MD PhD so that he could practice medicine with cancer patients while still conducting research in a lab. He explained that 70% of the time he conducts research, writes thesis papers, collaborates with other oncologists while he spends the other 30% of his time working at the Duke Medical Center with cancer patients suffering from gastrointestinal cancers. Most of his clinical work deals with patients with colorectal cancer, and most of his research is conducted on mice where he explores genomics and computational biology. His lab focuses on the use of genomic based technologies to identity and develop novel therapeutic targets for the treatment of gastrointestinal cancers. His lab also develops preclinical models using patient derived xenographs and early passage cell lines in GI cancers. Dr. Hsu has in fact developed this technique further so that it has been used to treat lung, breast, renal, bladder, melanoma, sarcoma, and other cancers. His primary focus however, is on colorectal cancers. He has done a lot of work with drug effects on cancer cell lines exploring the most potent drugs to combat the growth of these cell lines, and the way that he does this is by observing and analyzing cancer growth in mice. And though most of his work consists of working hands on with mice and live cancer cells from the OR, he spends some of his time conducting data analysis to evaluate the potency of certain drugs on different types of cancers.

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