Starting Research - Coulter Ralston / Dr. Ellenson / 07012022

At the halfway point of immersion, I have already learned a lot, and now I am starting to conduct my own research. With the guidance of Dr. Ellenson and Dr. Momeni, I will use various tools to identify pan-cancer trends in molecular mutations and see how specific pathways are perturbed differently in different types of cancers.

To start this week, I shadowed Dr. Cohen, and I was able to see two patients during their first visits. I learned that treatment plans for gynecological cancers, especially high grade serous ovarian cancer, tend to require several cycles of chemotherapy prior to surgical intervention, and then more cycles of chemotherapy may follow. The systemic delivery of paclitaxel and carboplatin (chemotherapeutics) are preferred for metastatic cancer, which ovarian cancer most often presents as. This really motivated my research, since my overarching goal of my PhD research, is to identify markers to detect and possibly treat high grade serous ovarian cancer sooner. 

The rest of this week has been dedicated to starting my research on pathways and how certain mutations may be preferred in specific cancer types. The research this week has been a bit slow, since it is a lot of new material. Despite my lack of experience, I learned more about specific biological pathways, data manipulation in R, and using Python to annotate data with the OncoKB API. 

I hope to continue my research next week and start analyzing my data. As always, I will continue to shadow in medical oncology, radiation oncology, and pathology!

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