This summer I am researching oxidative stress at a lab owned and operated by Sloan-Kettering in New York City. When I'm not commuting, I divide my time between doing productive work and waiting.Lab work requires its own form of patience. Cells never quite grow as quickly as you would like and experiments unavoidably incur periods of waiting. Rushing a procedure or juggling two experiments never seems to work out as planned; it's best to work with a patient trepidation to avoid losing a day's data.
The work is good. I'm trying to figure out a way to reverse the resistance that most cancer lines build up to chemotherapeutics. After chemo does its initial damage, the drug is often broken down into reactive oxygen species, as a secondary effect, that can cause the same if not more damage to the cell. Because of the high mutability of cancer cells, they can often have a natural immunity to this oxidative stress. If only one cell of a tumor survives the damage from chemo because of this resistance, the tumor will regrow with an unfortunate immunity to the same drug.
Goals (from easiest to hardest):
Must figure out how immunity develops.
Must figure out how to reverse immunity.
Must create drug to enhance existing cancer treatments.
Must cure cancer.
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