The highlight of my experience in VECR was the bioethics discussion led by Dr. Jeanne Chowning and the immune system presentation given by a guest speaker, Alicia Morales, who is a research technician in the Warren Lab at Fred Hutch. During the bioethics discussion, I experienced how hard it is to decide who gets the resources when everyone is in need. In the scenario given (picture below), I initially thought I could give resources according to how “useful” a person is to society; however, on a second thought, I realized that maybe some families rely wholly on one person, then wouldn’t that cause more trouble to the society? As the discussion went on with my group members, more factors went into play and left me thinking about the seemingly easy question even until today.
In the immune system presentation, I learned about some ways research has helped the immune system fight cancer. The immune system essentially helps our body fight off things that make us sick. But if you take a close look at the picture below, the human immune system is way more complex than that. Furthermore, there are lots of current research that works on the immune system to help people. One of them is called the Chimeric Antigen Receptor cells, or CAR T cells, which are T cells that are genetically engineered for use of immunotherapy. Seeing how much the immune system helps me really hooked up my interest!
When I was looking through the list of news on the Fred Hutch website, I came across Dr. Petros Grivas’ immunotherapy trial in advanced bladder and other urinary tract cancers. This clinical trial was an industry-sponsored trial. Avelumab is an immunotherapy drug for patients with advanced urothelial cancer. Metastatic urothelial cancer is a cancer that is first located in the bladder but spreads to other parts of the urinary tract. In the clinical trial, patients were able to be randomly assigned to the treated group or the control group. The treated group showed results that the patients lived longer than the control group patients. This trial is very exciting because metastatic urothelial cancer is often associated with short-term survival, typically for a few months only. Seeing that results are leading to longer lives would be a relief and huge breakthrough in the field of genitourinary cancers.
Link to article: https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/06/immunotherapy-trial-urothelial-carcinoma.html