Hunter Gaudio - Dr. Cristofanilli, Dr. Elemento - Summer Immersion Week 2

The second week of immersion was productive. On Monday, I attended Dr. Cristofanilli's circulating tumor cell (CTC) lab meeting, where a member of the lab presented updates on an automated HER2 quantification pipeline using the Parsortix Cell Separation System. After that, I continued researching topics relevant to breast cancer and liquid biopsy diagnostic methodologies. 

On Tuesday, the summer immersion group attended a presentation by Dr. George Shih, highlighting the potential of OpenAI's chatGPT to change medical care. We discussed the improvements of the new version recently released, chatGPT 4.0, and what the current limitations are. Dr. Shih also discussed open-source large language and large multimodal models such as Meta Llama 3. You can customize these models by further training them with your data, allowing them to outperform chatGPT for your specific task, as chatGPT is not intentionally trained with clinical data. After this meeting, I attended outpatient clinical service with Dr. Cristofanilli and Dr. Laura Munoz-Arcos, seeing patients within the entire spectrum of breast cancer, from common HR+, HER2-, invasive ductal carcinoma to aggressive, triple negative, metastatic breast cancer. 

Wednesday morning, I attended the CTC laboratory's weekly logistics meeting and journal club. The presented article explored TROP2 as a potential novel CTC marker that is sensitive to epithelial-to-mesenchymal hybrid cancer cells, better encompassing the heterogeneity of CTCs in patients who have triple negative breast cancer. I am still waiting to receive whole-exome sequencing data from the primary tumors of breast cancer patients enrolled in the Natera's Signatera clinical trial. Once I receive this data, the goal will be to track how specific mutation profiles perform with different treatments. We are hoping to submit an abstract for the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium by July 10th. 

On Thursday, I again was in the clinic all day with Dr. Cristofanilli along with Dr. Caterina Gianni. Dr. Cristofanilli does a great job explaining very complicated cases to me, someone with very little background in breast cancer biology and its treatment. He always makes sure to explain his decisions, and answer any questions I have. 

Friday, I am continuing to research/study my notes taken in the clinic and in the afternoon, we are attending a lecture on MRI data by Dr. Martin Prince. 

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