The most exciting discovery that I made? That’s a great question! I found some evidence which shows that a particular signalling pathway might be involved in the disease I am working on. We don’t know what mechanism your bones use to fuse in this disease, and I showed one of the possibilities might be correct. We still don’t know exactly what is going on, but my research has brought us closer to understanding!
I did some testing of blood samples from ovarian cancer patients just after i finished my PhD whilst I was looking for a job. I decided to test for something out of curiosity (I can’t tell you what coz it’s a secret) and because my supervisor who was also a surgeon/oncologist had also collected samples from patients a week after each chemotherapy treatment as well as at surgery, i decided to test those too. At first I only had samples from about 5 patients. What i found was that the protein i was testing for went up if you had chemotherapy. So my supervisor started collecting more samples from patients, and i tested those too.
now what we saw was that most patients protein level went up, but not all of those patients. He kept collecting samples, and I kept testing them. A few more have been tested by others in the lab since i left. Now a few years down the track we are able to look at those protein levels and whether or not those patients had survived so far, or had died because of the cancer becoming chemoresistant and it growing back and spreading.
From what we know of other experiments i did, this protein was making cancer cells chemoresistant, and now we had a test to check for this after one cycle of chemo instead of waiting for all of them to finish and waiting to see if the cancer came back (could be months waiting) So whilst it took a long time to be able to analyse the data in this way, the discovery is really exciting, and i hope one day it may be used by doctors toe work out how best to treat their patients much earlier, and improve the chance of survival.
I haven’t really had a chance to make many discoveries yet. I’m really at the beginning stages of my research career and it takes a long time to find something out. If you do get good results and find something new, you have to test it over and over again to make sure you get the same result every time. I’m hoping at the end of this year I will have done that in my honours project and have something cool to talk about in my thesis.
The most exciting discovery that I made? That’s a great question! I found some evidence which shows that a particular signalling pathway might be involved in the disease I am working on. We don’t know what mechanism your bones use to fuse in this disease, and I showed one of the possibilities might be correct. We still don’t know exactly what is going on, but my research has brought us closer to understanding!
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I did some testing of blood samples from ovarian cancer patients just after i finished my PhD whilst I was looking for a job. I decided to test for something out of curiosity (I can’t tell you what coz it’s a secret) and because my supervisor who was also a surgeon/oncologist had also collected samples from patients a week after each chemotherapy treatment as well as at surgery, i decided to test those too. At first I only had samples from about 5 patients. What i found was that the protein i was testing for went up if you had chemotherapy. So my supervisor started collecting more samples from patients, and i tested those too.
now what we saw was that most patients protein level went up, but not all of those patients. He kept collecting samples, and I kept testing them. A few more have been tested by others in the lab since i left. Now a few years down the track we are able to look at those protein levels and whether or not those patients had survived so far, or had died because of the cancer becoming chemoresistant and it growing back and spreading.
From what we know of other experiments i did, this protein was making cancer cells chemoresistant, and now we had a test to check for this after one cycle of chemo instead of waiting for all of them to finish and waiting to see if the cancer came back (could be months waiting) So whilst it took a long time to be able to analyse the data in this way, the discovery is really exciting, and i hope one day it may be used by doctors toe work out how best to treat their patients much earlier, and improve the chance of survival.
0
I haven’t really had a chance to make many discoveries yet. I’m really at the beginning stages of my research career and it takes a long time to find something out. If you do get good results and find something new, you have to test it over and over again to make sure you get the same result every time. I’m hoping at the end of this year I will have done that in my honours project and have something cool to talk about in my thesis.
0