October 23, 2015
Gemcitabine Resistance and Its Effects on the Metastatic Burden of Pancreatic Tumours in Mice over Time
Pancreatic cancer remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States today, and has an extremely high mortality rate among those who are diagnosed with the disease. Currently, there are no reliable ways to detect the disease in its early stages, and often surgery is not a viable option as the cancer has generally already begun to spread to other parts of the body. Thus, many patients have no other option but to undergo radiation therapy and/or chemotherapy. I worked in Emmanouil Fokas's lab, through the University of Oxford, investigating tumour progression and resistance to radiotherapy and chemotherapy, in the hopes of bettering a patient's clinical outcome. My lab group was working with the drug Gemcitabine to see how Gemcitabine resistance in mice would affect the formation of pancreatic tumours over time. My job was to cut, stain, image, and analyze liver sections from these mice in order to calculate the metastatic burden among in each of the trials.
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