Week 4 - Justin Levine

This week was full of continued shadowing in the OR and the clinic, and lab work, but was defined by two new and exciting challenges: conducting a peer review and starting a collaboration between my lab back in Ithaca and Dr. Spector’s lab here at WCM. During post-operative clinical visits and rounds, I was able to see progress in multiple patients, including the jaw reconstruction mentioned in last week’s post and multiple breast reconstructions. I have been learning a lot about wound healing, and have definitely come to appreciate the importance of vascularization in any sort of reconstruction or replacement in the body (read: everything depends on vascularization). Dr. Spector’s dermal regeneration template, DermiSphere, continues to generate nothing but positive and, frankly, impressive results - it seems like it is going to completely change the paradigm for skin grafts and any procedure where dermal regeneration is necessary.


Dr. Spector has been asked to review a manuscript submitted to Chemical Engineering Journal, and as its contents align very closely with my work (it involves a novel hydroxyapatite microsphere fabrication process, and validation of the new product’s viability as a dermal filler) he asked me to perform a detailed peer review that we can then discuss and polish together before returning feedback to the authors. This was my first time conducting a peer review outside of class exercises, but thanks to the help of Spector lab members (thank you Terrence and Xue!) and multiple deep readings I was able to generate some feedback that I hope (and believe) the authors will find meaningful. I learned a lot even from just this one review, and I know that these are skills I will be able to apply throughout my PhD.


I met with a few of Dr. Spector’s lab members to discuss a collaboration, whereby we plan on using clinical data from the EPIC database (and potentially others) to validate some of my lab’s in vitro findings about breast cancer bone metastasis. Specifically, we are looking for a link between bone mineral content and tumor cell dormancy in the bone, which we hope to find via patient bone mineral density scores and occurrence and aggressiveness of metastatic lesions in the bone. I am very excited about this collaboration, as it will help my lab in our goal of making sure our research is tied to the clinic, and will hopefully open the door to future collaborations between our labs. I think the Spector lab’s biomimetic breast cancer model and my lab’s obesity subgroup could really help each other out, and the lines of communication this nascent collaboration will open could be very helpful for everyone involved. We set parameters and began the process of applying for IRB approval this week, and are now just waiting for approval of some paperwork before taking further action.

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