VECR Highlight
My favorite guest speaker was Alicia Morales. It was so inspiring to see a POC woman doing such amazing work in the lab. I chose her talk on imposter syndrome as my highlight because psychology has always been an interest of mine and it was really interesting to learn about it in a real-world situation. Imposter syndrome can feel different to everyone but it is essentially a psychological phenomenon that “reflects a belief that you’re an inadequate, a fraud and/or incompetent failure despite evidence that indicates you’re skilled and quite successful.” I had learned about ACEs (Adverse Childhood experiences) previously and how it can increase the risk of many diseases but I didn’t know about how it can affect someone psychologically. I really liked how she showed us different ways imposter syndrome can manifest and I was relieved to find out many people felt the same way I do. She also taught us some ways to combat it such as talking through it, separate how you’re feeling from facts and looking at the positives.
Before the talk we took a test to see how our Clance Impostor Syndrome score which told us how much we experienced Impostor Syndrome. I think it was interesting to see how most people scored similarly and how everyone experiences a bit of Imposter Syndrome sooner or later. (From Alicia Morales)
Study
Treatment of cancer is often aggressive and cancer killing drugs can also affect healthy cells, causing serious side effects like a decreased immune system. The research scientists at Fred Hutch studied how the cancer drugs targeted which cells to kill with the goal of using gene editing to protect healthy cells. The specific cancer drug they tested with was a bispecific antibody, used to treat acute myeloid leukemia, which can latch onto two targets/proteins at once. It recognizes a protein on the cancer killing T cell called CD3 and the CD33 protein on cancerous cells. From there it acts almost like a bridge and brings the cells together so the tumor fighting T cell will kill the cancerous cells. However, the problem is that the CD33 protein is present in not only cancer cells but also some healthy blood stem cells. Scientists used CRISPR, a gene editing tool, to remove the CD33 protein from healthy blood stem cells. Then, using the bispecific antibody, they were able to target only the acute myeloid leukemia tumor cells and the genetically modified cells continued to function like normal blood stem cells.
This diagram shows how the CRISPR blood stem cells can evade the bispecific antibody and not be targeted by the T cell (From Dr. George Laszlo, obtained from Fred Hutch News article)
Although this article was published back in 2019, it is especially relevant now because of COVID-19. Cancer patients are more vulnerable to infections and viruses like COVID-19 because cancer drugs can attack healthy cells as well and weaken their immune system. With the addition of CRISPR into cancer treatment, patients’ blood stem cells can continue to generate a healthy immune system while the cancer drug can target the cancerous cells.
The leading scientists, Laszlo and Walter will continue studying bispecific antibodies as a new way to treat cancer while Humbert will continue to test the effect of combining the CRISPR method with other immunotherapy drugs.
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