Cass Nordmann - Dr. Sandra Demaria - Week 1

 I got the due dates for our blog posts mixed up, but I figured it’s better late than never! Unfortunately, Dr. Sandra Demaria, my clinical mentor, was out sick this past week. I wasn’t able to shadow any clinical work yet, but she should be returning the coming week so I’m looking forward to that. From what her students have told me, Dr. Demaria doesn’t do much patient-facing clinical work but mostly works in the pathology lab. As my research interests include tumor mechanics and physical properties, I think being able to see patient tissue samples will be an invaluable experience for me. I know from my research and the literature that tumors are stiffer than healthy tissue, but I haven’t been able to see or feel that difference for myself working with tumor spheroids. I also hope to gain a greater understanding of the structure of a real breast cancer tumor and what aspects our tumor spheroid model succeeds or fails to recapitulate.

While Dr. Demaria wasn’t able to be present this week, she connected me with some of the members of her lab, so I’ve been able to slowly start getting involved there. So far, I’ve only been observing their work. Their lab grows tumor organoids from patient-derived cells. These are similar to the tumor spheroids that our lab works with but are supposed to have more of the structures and characteristics of the original tissue type. I was able to see these organoids under a standard light microscope and was surprised, at least at that low magnification, how similar they looked to our spheroids. I’ll be interested in the coming weeks to see these organoids at higher magnifications and get a better sense of how they differ from our spheroids.  I also found the way they culture the organoids interesting. My lab in Ithaca uses specialized microwells for our spheroids but they seem to just pipette drops of cells and matrix onto regular well plates. I’m hoping to see this process done at some point this summer. I got to look at the recipe they use for their organoid media and it seems significantly more complex than what we use for spheroids. Some components were expected, such as the ROCK inhibitor Y-27632, needed to induce spheroid/organoid formation. Others, like some bone morphogenetic proteins, are still a mystery to me. Unlike immortalized cell lines, the patient-derived tumor organoids take a long time to grow, so there wasn't much for me to observe this week other than the basic upkeep of samples. However, in the coming weeks, I'm hoping to see some more meaningful experiments and get some hands-on experience myself.