Tyler Locke week 5

 I spent the first couple days of this week in the cardiac cath lab shadowing some more procedures. Along with some more left/right heart catheterizations and coronary interventions, I got to watch a self expanding aortic valve replacement with John. It was interesting to see this procedure done with a different device from what I have seen in the past.

In the second half of the week, I dug a bit more into my research project. I will be transitioning to focusing mostly on this for the next few weeks. Dr. Horn's research focuses on classifying patients with pulmonary hypertension, to see if there are any additional factors which may affect treatment or prognosis. We were interested in examining the pulmonary microcirculation in this disease, similarly to how the Schaffer-Nishimura lab has been looking at the coronary vasculature in heart failure. I am working on identifying potential experimental animal models of this disease which we could use for future studies. With PH being a very diverse disease, it is important to select a model system that fits the specific questions you are asking. Many PH models use hemodynamic manipulations (surgical pneumonectomy, arteriovenous shunts) to directly cause PH, which is useful for examining the downstream effects of this condition. However, since we are focused more on causes of PH, I will be looking into models which induce pulmonary vascular remodeling through pharmacological means. I am also looking into examining the lungs in our heart failure mice, to see if there is any pulmonary vascular remodeling secondary to their left heart failure.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

India Dykes - Dr. Spector - Weeks 7 & 8

Image
 For the last two weeks of immersion I wrapped up the bioprinter conversion project and spent some time in Dr. Spector's clinic for office hours. In the clinic, we observed an eyelid lift consultation and a liposuction patient follow-up. We also saw a patient who had a large abdominal hernia that had been increasing in size over the past 4 years that needed to be repaired. Dr. Spector showed us the MRI of the hernia that showed the intestines extending beyond the abdominal wall. In the lab I successfully completed the bioprinter hardware build which included customizing several iterations of prototypes before finalizing the design and flashing the custom bioprinter firmware onto the Prusa board. In the future the bioprinter will be used in Dr. Spector's lab for 3D printing custom collagen breast cancer models and vascularized adipose tissue platforms.
Read more

Cory Knox - Dr. Liston - Wk8

My final week at immersion consisted of wrapping up surgeries with Shane, analyzing the data collected from the pilot Novelty Induced Hypophagia study, presenting my work amongst my peers and the immersion administration, and going to some of my final NYC bucket list locations.  The surgeries all went well and I was able to help Shane set up for his last few behavioral studies needed for the supplementary figures in his upcoming publication. We found that our pilot study was only effective on male mice, so 15 more males had to undergo fiber optic implantation to generate a well powered assay for later on. I am very thankful to Shane for teaching me so much this summer. The presentation also went well. It was interesting to see what my peers were doing this summer and I was excited to share the experiments that Shane and I had been working on.  I was also able to use the final week as a chance to visit some places in NYC that I had put off. It was very fun going to the Bronx zo...
Read more

Harry Zou Week 8

My last week was a busy week, both on the clinical side and also on the research side. I shadowed in the clinic and also in the hospital. On Wednesday, I shadowed a pulmonologist, Dr. Meredith Turetz in her practice. In her practice, Dr. Turetz mostly sees patients with bronchiectasis as well as asthma. The first patient came in as a follow up for severe asthma exacerbations and Dr. Turetz prescribed Symbicort, a medicine that she liked since it had both a fast acting component in a steroid as well as a long acting component in the bronchodilator. In between patients, we also had an interesting conversation on the changing landscape of asthma medication with more biologics being approved now. She also saw a patient who had bronchiestasis as well as a previous non-tuberculosis mycobacteria (NTM) infection. It was interesting to me to learn that even though the airways look dilated in bronchiestasis, the flimsy nature of the airways causes them to collapse resulting in restricted breathi...
Read more