For your viewing pleasure

How cool is this?

This is a longitudinal section of a live mouse (T2 weighted MRI scan). The tumor is just under the skull, at midbrain.

I have got the coolest job.

Success is sweet

I saw tumors. The MRIs were successful. It always amazes me to see so much detail in an MRI. The technology involved is really quite straight forward (it has been used by chemists for decades) but the application of the technology is really ingenious. Too cool.

MRI tomorrow

The JNK experiments are finally done - at least for now. I am getting ready to do some in vivo experiments. I think I described the experiments awhile ago but they failed when we did them in December. Briefly, I have implanted human tumors into mice that have been genetically bred not to reject foreign tissue. The first time I did this experiment I simply made a small pocket under the skin between the shoulder blades, inserted a chunk of tumor, and sutured it back up. This time, I not only placed tumor between the shoulder blades, but I also drilled through the cranium, exposed the brain, and placed a small piece of tumor inside the cranial vault. Since the tumors we deal with are found in the brain, this approach more closely approximates what is actually going on in a human patient. I had 15 successful surgeries. Tomorrow, I am going to take 5 of the mice and give them MRIs to establish a baseline tumor size. Once all 15 mice are scanned, I will begin a daily 12 week treatment regime that will culminate in a final MRI (to establish an endpoint tumor size) and a removal of the tumor for immunocytochemical analysis.

I am also thick in the middle of some cloning experiements. I am trying to clone a nuclear export signal or a nuclear localization signal onto the front of the p75 receptor gene. Once this is done, we will be able to transfect cells with these molecular constructs to get a better idea of what p75 does in certain environments. Wish me luck.