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Tanya Gordonov: I'm doing my honors thesis, a George H. Cook's honors thesis. We're researching
pancreatic cancer which is a very deadly cancer in the United Cancer and around the world,
because it's very hard to detect it early on. WE have been researching the protein osteopontin
for many, many years, before I was even there, and osteopontin is a protein that's found
in all body fluids and it has many various functions throughout the body. Osteopontin
has been correlated with cancer progression of various cancers, including pancreatic cancer.
Smoking of nicotine products, of tobacco products, has also been found to correlate with progression
of various cancers such as lung cancer and pancreatic cancer. So, the studies that I'm
conducting are linking nicotine with osteopontin and how those together work to make pancreatic
cancer as lethal as it is or the prognosis for it worse. One of the ways in which we're
studying the effects of osteopontin pancreatic cancer is that we have pancreatic cancer cell
lines that we work with. For example, if we want to see if these cells make more osteopontin
are they going to be more cancerous? So, what we do is something called transfection. We
insert pieces of DNA of the code for osteopontin into the cells. It's a lengthy process and
a lot of trial and error is involved, but the goal is to get these cells to secrete
more osteopontin. Another thing we do is we try to suppress the osteopontin in these cells
in order to see whether if these cells make less osteopontin, is that going to make them
less cancerous? Many studies have been conducted that have studied the links of osteopontin
to cancer. Specifically, cancers can be made worse by metastasizing, and that is spreading
around the body. Cancer cells migrate throughout the body and create new tumors, which make
it a lot worse, and the osteopontin has been linked to those activities of cancerous cells,
to the migration, to proliferation, it's actually, I think it's been used as a marker, so if
there's high osteopontin in the blood and in the plasma, then that correlates with a
worse prognosis for cancer, more likelihood of the cancer metastasizing and spreading.
Studies have been conducted in animals, transgenic mice for example which naturally have been
made to not make osteopontin and their cancers have not been as bad. My faculty advisor is
Dr. David Denhardt from the cell Biology Department. Dr. Denhardt is a really create research advisor
and he is very knowledgeable. He is always there unlike a lot of other research advisors,
so he's available and after a couple of years of working there, he's come to trust me enough
to allow me to say what direction I want to go in, to be able to tell him what I think
about certain projects and he values my opinion I think. For the past several years that I've
been doing research, I've learned just how a lab's goal evolve, how in general, research
is conducted, how you have to collaborate with others, how you have to troubleshoot,
techniques, how just in general, how research is conducted, and as well as a lot of techniques
that I'll definitely have to use when I'm a graduate student.
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