The most challenging part of this research was the serial dilutions. It was difficult to be able to make proper dilutions in the right amount of food when mixing both drug and negative control. It was also challenging to not be able to continue our work and look more into data that we just did not have time to reproduce and analyze.
It was most enjoyable to work with my group and problem solve to get to the right concentrations. It was also exciting to see that we were getting great results and have a good idea for our future directions.
I big issue with cancer treatments today and one of the main reasons why cancer is such an awful disease to get is the toxicity in the treatment course. Cancer is so terrible because not only does the disease make you sick, but the treatment can make you sick too because it often is killing all of your healthy cells too.
For this reason, we focused on a synergistic approach in our future directions and secondary experimentation because we thought that this can lower the dosage of both drugs (colchicine and methiothepin) and therefore lower the toxicity of the overall treatment. They will work together so we will have to have less of them and lower toxicity.
Very good presentation! How do you think this drug could be used in chemotherapy, given that we don’t want to kill all the human cells with the cancerous cells and this drug is pretty effective?
I think that this drug can be used in combination with radiation therapy as a pretty severe form of treatment. We would have to run experiments to figure out the therapeutic effect of methiothepin in order to reduce toxicity. From our secondary experimentation it appears that perhaps 50 ug/mL in combination with a known chemotherapy would be an effective starting point for this. Either way, the chemotherapy treatment would be very aggressive with a drug like this.
It might be reasonable to suggest short periods of aggressive treatment and then perhaps some healing time for the healthy cells to regenerate before submitting them to more aggressive treatment. This would get rid of the cancer cells and allow healthy cells to be more prevalent after each treatment.
Allowing the drug to remain in the cell for longer periods of time increases the time allowed for that compound to work. If a drug can move through the cell quickly it may not have ample time to impact the cell if the compound is not toxic enough.
This is why we moved to secondary experimentation with colchicine in combination with methiothepin because methiothepin will hypothetically allow colchicine to be more effective at a lower dose because it gets more time to be toxic to the cell.
What part of your research did you find the most challenging? Most enjoyable? Loved the presentation! Very knowledgeable 🙂
The most challenging part of this research was the serial dilutions. It was difficult to be able to make proper dilutions in the right amount of food when mixing both drug and negative control. It was also challenging to not be able to continue our work and look more into data that we just did not have time to reproduce and analyze.
It was most enjoyable to work with my group and problem solve to get to the right concentrations. It was also exciting to see that we were getting great results and have a good idea for our future directions.
Thank you!!
How did you decide to focus on a ‘synergistic’ approach versus a novel discovery? Really interesting!
I big issue with cancer treatments today and one of the main reasons why cancer is such an awful disease to get is the toxicity in the treatment course. Cancer is so terrible because not only does the disease make you sick, but the treatment can make you sick too because it often is killing all of your healthy cells too.
For this reason, we focused on a synergistic approach in our future directions and secondary experimentation because we thought that this can lower the dosage of both drugs (colchicine and methiothepin) and therefore lower the toxicity of the overall treatment. They will work together so we will have to have less of them and lower toxicity.
Very good presentation! How do you think this drug could be used in chemotherapy, given that we don’t want to kill all the human cells with the cancerous cells and this drug is pretty effective?
I think that this drug can be used in combination with radiation therapy as a pretty severe form of treatment. We would have to run experiments to figure out the therapeutic effect of methiothepin in order to reduce toxicity. From our secondary experimentation it appears that perhaps 50 ug/mL in combination with a known chemotherapy would be an effective starting point for this. Either way, the chemotherapy treatment would be very aggressive with a drug like this.
It might be reasonable to suggest short periods of aggressive treatment and then perhaps some healing time for the healthy cells to regenerate before submitting them to more aggressive treatment. This would get rid of the cancer cells and allow healthy cells to be more prevalent after each treatment.
What good does it do to allow the drug to stay inside the cell longer due to the inhibition of the pump?
Allowing the drug to remain in the cell for longer periods of time increases the time allowed for that compound to work. If a drug can move through the cell quickly it may not have ample time to impact the cell if the compound is not toxic enough.
This is why we moved to secondary experimentation with colchicine in combination with methiothepin because methiothepin will hypothetically allow colchicine to be more effective at a lower dose because it gets more time to be toxic to the cell.