Week 5: Jeremy Keys

My fifth week has been rather uneventful as I have been getting started on the project that I was first assigned at the end of last week.  Regarding my workload, I have transitioned from doing clinical work and observing surgeries over the course of the week to primarily focusing on the analysis of data that had been previously collected from patient samples.  Unfortunately, I have been struggling a bit to interpret the existing data, as well as struggling to find an “in” to interpret the data in a meaningful way.  I am certainly interested in working through the results though, as the work pertains to how the experimental trial using copper depletion to prevent cancer recurrence in advanced stage breast cancer patients, and this may have salient ties to my research project at Cornell studying the mechanisms of cancer cell migration to form metastases.  Ultimately, now that I have gotten through the majority of primary literature relating to the copper-related proteome, and the influences of copper-dependency on cancer progression, I am excited to see how the depletion of cancer from the tumor environment leads to changes that may prevent tumor recurrence.  

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