Throughout my two weeks here in the Explorers program, I have learned a lot. The speakers, researchers, and everyone involved in this program have all been very friendly and welcoming, answering my questions with as much detail as they could. Everything I’ve done in the past two weeks at Fred Hutch has been extremely fun and educational for me. From listening to talks from esteemed scientists and visiting their labs to actually doing our own lab activities, it has truly been an eye opening experience.
A personal highlight would definitely be getting to visit the Project Violet Lab where they are trying to use small protein molecules from plants and animals, called peptides, to potentially make new cancer drugs. Dr. Mesfin Gewe and Shanon Turnbaugh gave us a tour of the lab, first stopping by a blown glass art display that was commissioned in honor of a few of Dr.Olson’s patients. They then walked us through the lab, showcasing how the lab runs and what tools and technology they use. They explained the procedure that the researchers of Project Violet go through to select and study a protein, eventually engineering them to produce optides (optimized peptide) for potential drug use. It was a touching moment to see these beautiful sculptures and the stories behind them but it was even more amazing to see the work that they do and the progress that has been made. They have already been successful in using optides derived from scorpion venom to make Tumor Paint, a drug that causes the tumor to glow so surgeons can better distinguish between which cells are cancerous and which are healthy. The drug illuminates only cancerous tumors because the optides bind to a receptor that is unique to cancer cells and not found on normal tissue. They are working on finding other usable optides but the process is intensive and many optides that they test won’t be viable targets. The Project Violet team first identifies potential drug candidates by placing peptides with either normal or cancerous human cells and selecting the ones that killed the cancerous cells but not the healthy cells. From there, they find the DNA sequence that codes for that protein and inserts it into human embryonic kidney cells to produce it. Once the cells have produced enough, the research technicians will harvest and purify the protein so that they can do further tests on it to gather more data about its properties. This process is done by hand but they also have a robot named Sam that can produce 100-300 optides a week.
One of the reasons this stuck out to me so much was because of where these peptides are found and how well they could work. It’s easy to forget about how much there is still to learn about and explore on Earth. It’s astonishing to think that such potentially powerful drugs can be made from plants and animals yet it is also so simple at the same time. These organisms have to protect themselves too so they have to make their own drugs. And through millions of years of evolution, the outcome are these incredibly useful proteins and the blueprints to make them right in their DNA. Another reason is the incredible diversity of people and backgrounds that were represented. There are the research technicians working in the lab to make optides, the structural biologists working to solve the protein structure, and many others. This really opened my eyes because I thought to do research, you had to study biology. For the first time, I saw the importance of having other skills like math, to figure out the statistical data, or writing, to write grants or reports. Everyone had something to bring to the table and it is the combination of all of those skills that made it successful and that really changed my understanding of what a career in research could be.
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