Week 4: Seo-Ho/Dr. Thomas Fahey

This week I watched Dr. Fahey perform two robotic surgeries: a cholecystectomy (removal of the gallbladder due to a gallbladder stone) and an incisional hernia repair. I had watched these procedures last week as well, but it was interesting seeing the patient-to-patient differences. For example, the color of the gallbladders was different and they were holding different amounts of bile. The hernia repair patient had a lot of adhesions from previous surgeries, so Dr. Fahey spent time removing the adhesions so that the bowels could be pushed back into their correct location. The cases in the clinic seem to be more diverse than in the operating room, as even though the resulting procedure may be the same between patients, each of their situations that led them to that decision is very different. Two of the cases I saw were related to figuring out a diagnosis. Based on reports from other physicians and tests, Dr. Fahey and his team narrowed down potential diagnoses for the patients and identified next steps to confirm or deny their hypotheses.

In the lab, I have started analyzing spatial transcriptomic data from patients with pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors to determine how the cellular microenvironment differs between patients to identify potential metastatic markers. I am now culturing EndoC beta cells, two kinds of embryonic stem cell lines, and HEK293T lentivirus-producing cells. Eventually, I will be using these three cell types to produce multicellular organoids with different induced mutations to validate the spatial transcriptomic data. I look forward to the coming weeks when I will have dived into the computational aspect of this project more.

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