From Zeroasterisk

Laura Dent

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Background

I am an old friend of Alan's from Houston. We met through our mothers at a youth art month function. We bonded over sandwiches and a rousing discussion about our love of soccer. Alan went away to school and thus began the most entertaining pen pal relationship I have had to date. I especially remember the brilliant writing style, some insane stories (insanely fun I mean), and the custom designed envelopes and stationary.

May 30,2005: The Lab Rat Update

As of May 30, 2005 I have NOT cured cancer. However, I can truthfully claim that I had to walk two miles uphill in the snow to get to the lab every day. That's Boston for y'all. I am SO back in Texas now! I do miss my job in Boston though. I was working with a team of five MD/PhDs to develop a new test for patients with Leukemia. After someone is diagnosed with Leukemia there are several different treatment options available. The first choice is usually bone marrow transplantation. A suitable match must be found before a patient can have the transplant. Then there are chemotherapy and pharmaceuticals. In my lab we monitored patients with several types of leukemia using PCR testing. In PCR testing a tiny amount of genetic material is copied many times by incubating it with an enzyme at a series of temperatures. The goal of this testing is to estimate how much cancer is in the patients blood so that the treatment can be scaled up or down. Since the monitoring is being done at the molecular level, RNA (ribonucleic acid) detection, a treatment plan can be adjusted before the patient ever gets sick. The "old" test we were using was called as 1/3, 2/3, or 3/3 positive reactions. Better than nothing, but that still doesn't give an exact amount. We transferred the test over to a new robot in the lab that does real time quantitative PCR. In this assay you find a reference target that will be present in all samples, cancer and normal. Then you copy both your reference target and your leukemia target in the presence of a dyes coupled to quenchers. The dyes and quenchers are attached to small bits of DNA that bind to the reference and leukemia targets. When a copy of either target is made it's specific dye is released. The robot emits light from a halogen bulb and scans to see how many unbound dye molecules fluoresce. This way we were able to get an actual amount of cancer to report. Much easier for everyone involved.