• Question: What experiments do your guys do

    Asked by Isaac on 5 Jun 2023.
    • Photo: Kathleen Duffin

      Kathleen Duffin answered on 5 Jun 2023:

      I am interested in how treatment for cancer makes it difficult for people to have babies in the future. We think this is partly because the chemotherapy (medicine which treats cancer) attacks the cancer cells, but also attacks some of the normal healthy cells in the body, including cells in the ovary (where girls have their eggs) and testes (where boys make sperm).

      So an example of one of my experiments would be taking the testis from a mouse, cutting it into little pieces, and then putting chemotherapy (anti-cancer) drugs onto these pieces. I then slice them into very thin slices and put them onto a glass slide. I can then add special fluorescent labels, which mean that the cells will light up different colours under a special microscope. This means I can look at the testis and see which bits of it have been damaged by the chemotherapy medication!

    • Photo: Ana Vitlic

      Ana Vitlic answered on 5 Jun 2023:

      I process tumour (cancer) tissues and analyse them to understand better the structure of the certain types of cancer. The technique I use most often is called flow cytometry, where I process tumour to single cell suspension and look what type of cells are in there. This is important as not all white blood cells are good for fighting cancer – and some that are good might be exhausted (we literally call them exhausted cells ) and need a little boost. Based on that we can suggest therapy that could potentially wake them up a bit and make them work better.

    • Photo: Jen Antrobus

      Jen Antrobus answered on 5 Jun 2023:

      I do lots of different types of experiments. I grow cancer cells, and make sure they have enough food and stay warm so they grow happily! I also treat the cancer cells with different drugs and irradiate them to see what kills them and how we can make them more sensitive to the radiation.

    • Photo: Kehinde Ross

      Kehinde Ross answered on 5 Jun 2023:

      We might combine RNA with nanoparticles. Then we will grow cancer cells in a Petri dish or similar plastic vessel. To test if the nanoparticles packaged with RNA might be useful, we put them on the cancer cells and measure whether the cells die within 24 or 48 hours after application of the RNA. The MTT method is commonly used to estimate such cell death. You can see the method in action here https://youtu.be/vn6enA6lSKs

    • Photo: Giampiero Valenzano

      Giampiero Valenzano answered on 5 Jun 2023:

      I do a lot of tissue staining. That means that I take a real 3D tumour, a cut a super thin slice of it with a fancy knife, and then I add many colours to it. Every colour is one feature of the tumour, and if I see that for example the tumour stains yellow, then I know that that tumour can be treated using a drug that destroys the protein that makes it go yellow. And so on 🙂

    • Photo: Adelaide Young

      Adelaide Young answered on 6 Jun 2023:

      It really depends on the day. I am currently doing a lot of work with cancer cell lines which involves growing cells in a flask with media. I am making fluorescent cells at the moment which turn on different colours when a gene is expressed so we can see when cells shift into different states. Then we can test how the cells respond to different compounds and whether it pushes the cancer cells into our state of interest. I also work with zebrafish so sometimes my days are busy with looking after the fish, crossing them, collecting embryos, and imaging them under the microscope.

    • Photo: Zahra Rattray

      Zahra Rattray answered on 9 Jun 2023:

      We do different types of experiments. We make some medicines that are very small (nanoparticles) using different equipment. We test them to see their size, their charge and how stable they are in blood. Then we look at how they behave inside human cancer cells- whether they kill the cancer cells or what changes they make to the biology of these cells.

    • Photo: Jean Ling Tan

      Jean Ling Tan answered on 14 Jun 2023:

      I am interested in understanding what makes some cells respond to chemotherapy in ovarian cancer, why some cells don’t respond and why some initially respond before becoming resistant. So most of my work involves growing cells in flasks, then using them in different experiments. For example, I might transfer the cells I have growing in flasks to a plate where I dose them with different drugs and look at how they respond. I might do this by looking at the cells under a microscope, or putting them into a machine that takes pictures of them while they grow in the drug.

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