Becoming a Tumornator!

Hi, I’m Akshaya! Welcome to the first week of my senior project blogs!

Before we start delving deeper into the fascinating world of cancer biology, here is some basic information about myself, my motivations, and my project itself! 

Cancer, as many of you may know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in the body. It can spread to many areas, or it can remain localized in one particular part of the body as well. 

I have been interested in cancer research from a young age. My grandfather passed away from bone cancer. In his case, the first round of chemotherapy worked but just as he started his second round, his body didn’t react well and he passed away. From this personal loss, I became curious about how cancer works, and the fatality rate of cancer piqued my interest in wanting to work in cancer research. 

In 10th grade, I attended a talk by Dr. Mario Capecchi, a famous Nobel laureate who is known for his work in gene-targeting in mice. He talked about the applications for his work in cancer, which inspired me to start looking for research experiences regarding cancer. By manipulating specific genes within mouse-derived embryonic stem cells, he discovered how to genetically engineer a mouse devoid of a specific gene to analyze the specific function of a particular gene by investigating its absence. This has become important in the analysis of genetic mutations common in cancer patients, and genetics-based cancer research. In 11th grade, I was accepted to an internship at Berkeley Pharma Tech, where I, along with a team, wrote a research paper regarding the tumor microenvironment and immunotherapy. I focused on checkpoint inhibitors and cellular pathways of cancer, learning about the involvement of CTLA-4 and PD-1 (checkpoint inhibitors) in tumor growth. Additionally, I studied signaling pathways involved, like the mTOR and AMPK pathways. Our team also studied how we can use CAR T-cell therapy, a type of cancer immunotherapy treatment that uses genetically altered T-cells to destroy cancer cells more effectively and use CD8+ T cells to fight the spread of tumors. Enzymes, signaling pathways, and molecules involved are very important in cancer research as they could hold the key to unlocking new therapies, especially in immunotherapy.

For my project, I specifically chose lung cancer, as it is the second most common type of cancer in both males and females in the United States. About 80-85% is diagnosed as non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and about 10-15% of lung cancers are diagnosed as small cell lung cancer (SCLC). There has been a lot of research as to how we can cure cancer, and one such field in the modern day is immunotherapy. Immunotherapy is focused on boosting parts of the immune system in order to find and destroy cancer cells, and thus has been termed to be more precise than other cancer therapies, with less side effects. 

Unfortunately, many of the current therapies in cancer treatments aren’t very effective at treating late stage lung cancer, which is when most people get diagnosed. Many medications are extremely expensive, meaning that many times people cannot afford to get the treatment they need. With my project, I hope to find a novel potential treatment for non-small cell lung cancer that is also cheaper for people to use. This experiment can help increase the effectiveness of immunotherapy treatment in lung cancer by combining two natural compounds, curcumin and quercetin, that have been known for their immune modulatory effects. 

Well then, here comes the end of today’s blurb, and I sincerely hope you will join me on my next blog! Until then!