ELISA Lab
The highlight of my experience at Fred Hutch was when we did an ELISA lab which is used to determine treatments for breast cancer. This was important to me because my aunt has breast cancer and the day we did the lab, she happened to be at my house when I got home. I really enjoyed talking to her about what I did that day and i was really surprised to hear that her doctor had done the same thing for her cancer. An ELISA test is something you may get after you’ve already been diagnosed with cancer and, for breast cancer patients, it will test to see if the cancer has certain receptors that indicate it will be responsive to a treatment.
ELISA stands for enzyme linked immunosorbent assay and the science behind it uses antibodies. Antibodies are really useful because they are very specific in what they will bind to. In our case, we are using them to bind to an antigen that is only present if the patients’ cancer contains the receptors that we are looking for. In our lab, we looked for two hormone receptors, estrogen and progesterone, and for a protein called HER2. The results showed that the patient was positive for both hormone receptors and negative for the HER2 protein and this is called Luminal A. This is the same as what my aunt has and I really enjoyed being able to explain some of the things that she had been told but didn't understand herself.
One of the reasons that I love science, and biology specifically, is because I can relate it to my life and what happens outside the classroom. This was especially true with the ELISA test and I didn’t even know it when I was doing the lab. I thought is was cool albeit a little tedious but it still seemed like just another thing we were learning or another lab activity. But when I got home and my aunt asked how my day was and what we did, I never expected to have so much to say. We talked for a lengthy period of time and as I’ve said before, I really enjoyed it. I didn’t know what an impact it left it on me until after I had already gone home. The most important thing that it did for me was instill a new drive to learn as much as I could because now it was, even just by a little but, not entirely about me.
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