Work goes on and on

Work has been a bit slow lately. We just got a grant sent off to the NIH and are breathing a sigh of relief. I also have 3 residents in the lab. That is taking a lot of my time. Two of them are on 10 week research rotations so I am trying to ensure that their time is well spent and that they can hit the ground running. Luckily, they are all three pretty good. I taught one of them how to do a cochlear dissection last week and he picked it up immediately. I have never had someone pick up the proceedure that quickly. I also had to re-run a Western Blot for our Post-doc. For some reason, she just can't get one to work. I am not sure why. I think it is because she is trying to take shortcuts. In any case I got it to work on the first time - thankfully. I am not sure the results are what she expected but at least she has some results.

I have a big round of mouse surgeries coming up in a couple of weeks. We had a patient come in the clinic with a huge tumor. We are going to implant pieces of that tumor into 16 mice. The tumors will be placed intracranially and monitored by MRI pre treatment and post treatment. I will treat them for 3 months with daily injections of an inhibitor that targets a signalling protein called JNK (Jun N-terminal Kinase). The surgeries will be a challenge but the daily treatments will be a pain in the rear.