My sophomore seminar class was Biology 288 here at Longwood University and the main purpose of that class was to set up the skeleton of an ePortfolio and to prepare students for rigorous upper level biology courses. For the class, we had to do a literature review about a topic of our choice. I chose to research about breast cancer and the efficacy of chemotherapy and Tamoxifen, an estrogen receptor antagonist antineoplastic agent, in treating breast cancer in elderly patients. I chose this topic because at the time I was really interested in cancer research after recently losing multiple relatives to cancer. After all my research, writing the literature review, and giving a presentation, I was eager to continue doing more research with breast cancer.
The following semester I was given the opportunity to further my research with cancer by working in a tumor immunology research lab on campus with a professor. My research focused on how a naturally occurring plant stilbene, Resveratrol, can enhance the anti-tumor efficacy of chimeric PD1-expressing T cells. I tested this in the murine breast cancer cell line, E0771. So far, I have concluded from my research that Resveratrol decreases T cell proliferation but did not alter T cell survival and incubation with resveratrol increased chimeric PD1 T cell killing of tumor cells. Therefore, the combination of chPD1 T cells and Resveratrol may lead to enhanced anti-tumor efficacy.
As of now I am finishing up by research by investigating and analyzing the cytokine secretion by the chPD1 T cells using ELISA and LegendPlex analysis. I get to present my research at the 2019 American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in April this year. This is a wonderful opportunity for me to network with other scientists around the country and to present my findings to people who research similar things. This experience will definitely help me when I am applying to jobs and eventually even graduate school in the future.