• Question: my dad works in cancer research, what do you specifically do?

    Asked by george37 to Sarah on 14 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sarah Thomas

      Sarah Thomas answered on 14 Mar 2011:

      Hi there,

      Ok I’ve been researching different chemicals in your body that are involved in cancer. Some of these are enzymes, some of them are growth factors and some of them are sugars that are found on the outside of your cells.

      People that have cancer have extremely high levels of these enzymes and growth factors that I mentioned in their blood stream.

      I have been making these sugars in the lab and I have found a way of attaching fluorescent labels on them. I have also found that some of these cancer chemicals interact with my sugars. They chop the sugar in half! If that happens when the sugar has a flourescent label on it, when it gets chopped in half, it will start to glow. This is how my blood test will work. If you add the sugar+label to the blood of the patient that has cancer, it should become fluorescent!!

      If your Dad would like to read about the chemistry that I do, he can read this paper:

      Enabling methodology for the end functionalisation of glycosaminoglycan oligosaccharides, Emiliano Gemma, Odile Meyer, Dušan Uhrín and Alison N. Hulme
      Molecular BioSystems, 2008, 4, pg 481-495.

      From Sarah

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