Week 3: Fully Immersed

Despite the fact that this was a short week due to the Fourth of July, it was relatively productive. I now have a good understanding of my project involving a meta-analysis of complications associated with ascending aortic aneurysms/dissections. Wednesday through Friday I collaborated with the librarian to begin sifting through all papers that are relevant to the meta-analysis and began to input hundreds of patient's data into an aortic aneurysm database. This was really eye opening as I had to look up each patient individually and track their aneurysm size over time and when they were given the aortic repair graft surgery once the aneurysm reached a critical size of about 5.5 cm. Over the course of the short week, I was able to sift through 850 patients worth of data and have about 600 to go. Although this was really tedious and mind numbing at times, it will be worth it in the end once the database is all set up with all the data that is necessary to run the studies.

Besides my work in the cardiothoracic department doing clinical research, I was also able to get in touch with Dr. Todd Evan's lab at Weill Cornell (one of my collaborators) and began to shadow a graduate student on specific techniques involving differentiating embryonic stem cells into cardiomyocytes.  The cardiac regeneration field is using pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (or PSC-CMs) since they are the only relevant cell source that allows one to obtain a high cardiomyocyte yield. Primary adult cardiomyocytes do not proliferate (which is the reason why when one has a myocardial infarction it leads to a fibrotic non-functional tissue and eventually can lead to congestive heart failure). The adult cardiac progenitor cells that reside in the heart are also too small of a population and there is wide debate on whether they can efficiently differentiate into a functioning cardiomyocytes. Therefore, in order to regenerate the heart, one approach is to use PSC-CMs. However, the main limitation to using these cells is the fact they have a fetal-like functionally immature phenotype and therefore when seeded on to a infarct, they often will not integrate with the host tissue and therefore not regenerate the infarcted region. As part of my own research back in Ithaca, I am interested in looking at various stages of fetal heart extracellular matrix to understand how cardiomyocytes naturally mature throughout development. As part of my research, I need to be able to use these PSC-CMs reliably and therefore shadowing in Dr. Evan's Lab will provide me with ample opportunity to master these techniques. An example of immature PSC-CMs beating in a dish can be seen below by the gif taken from an online source.

                                              https://www.thermofisher.com/content/dam/LifeTech/Images/integration/A14n09-Fig5A-Day6-300px.gif

Next week, I will also be observing some robotic cardiac surgeries so stay tuned for next week's blog post as I am sure I will have a lot to talk about!



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