My Internship
The Life Health Science Internship Program is a part time paid internship program that helps students pursuing in especially life science majors to meet professionals in IUPUI and gain skills, search for careers and develop professionally. I am really appreciative towards the people who maintain this program and help us students, reach towards our goals expectations by making things much easier for us.
I am currently working in a lab, which is in the department of Medical and Molecular Genetics in IUPUI. My supervisor is Dr. Sreedhar Thirumala and I found this lab to be very interesting. This lab is assisting a vector company that is working in the facilities nearby, and currently we are growing human bone marrow stem cells from diseased patients and the cells that is being grown in here have the potential to be put back into patients who require bone marrow stem cells. mostly the These cells are being stored in freezers for later use and are run on experiments, in order to make sure these stem cells are having the required antigens to make sure that they are capable to assist living human cells.
The amount of stem cells that people donate for patients and for research work is not so common as giving samples of donated blood. Most likely it is a very rare case that we find the stem cells of donors to match with the stem cells of the patients who require such cells. The approach of trying to grow healthy stem cells from diseased patients for many purposes, actually benefits us from a lot of ways. It helps to obtain a millions and billions of stem cells than receiving a donated sample that includes few stem cells. The process of obtaining stem cells from diseased or living humans are not an easy procedure and it requires a lot of time and effort to get these stem cells. If they were grown in labs. maintained and harvested at right periods it would be more productive and efficient than extracting cells. Also the cells that are grown in plates with media are more prone to adapt for different environments because they have already been exposed to varying circumstances and can withstand low differences than regular stem cells. Since these stem cells are also being tested for antigens, the quality of the cells will be significant for replanting or further research.
I picked this site because I was interested to learn how genes and medicine intersect and one of the main research work that is being carried out in this lab will be gene therapy. Gene therapy is the process of trying to prevent or cure diseases by the use of genes and in this process, the nucleic acids will be delivered as drugs into the patient to treat a disease. I am really interested to learn how this works and also this internship would help me to get started on publishing my own research paper, which will enable to move forward in research work. I also feel satisfied with getting familiar with the protocols of an actual lab, which happen to use more sterile techniques, advanced equipment, efficient methods to perform tasks and how to be aware of factors that are mostly ignored and does not deal with academic labs. This will make me prepare professionally, which is one of the main goals of LHSI and I am looking forward for a busy year ahead.
It will be definitely challenging for someone like me to get exposed everything in the lab and get hold of everything from getting to know how to use equipment to properly handle projects. One of the things that seems to be very challenging is to keep up with your internship I really wish from this internship is to get started with my own project and I feel like this is a big step that I will be stepping into in my life and I really would like to put in all my effort to make the project that will be given to me a success. I believe this will make me a more organizing, time management and investigation skills that are extremely important for a potential career as a researcher.
Characterization of Porcine Vertebrae Derived Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cells (Pv-BM-MSC)
Bone Marrow Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells (BM-MSC) are a well characterized population of adult stem cells. Recently a new population of BM-MSC have been identified in human vertebral bone marrow tissues and have been shown to maintain superior stem cell properties compared to traditional lilac crest derived BM-MSC.
Pigs exhibit similar structure and function to those of humans and have been widely used as a valuable model in biomedical research such as tissue engineering and cell therapy. In this study, for the first time, BM-MSC from porcine vertebral bodies (Pv-BM-MSC) are isolated and characterized. A two-tier Pv-BM-MSC cell banking system consisting of Master Cell Bank (MCB) and Working Cell Bank (WCB) were established. The MCB is fully characterized for cellular identify which includes testing for cellular morphology and surface phenotype using multicolor flow-cytometry. The potency of the cells was tested through adipogenic, osteogenic and chondrogenic differentiation ability and gene expression profiles. The gene expression profiles have been shown to verify this stemness. Our data shows that porcine vertebral bone marrow tissue is a rich source of BM-MSC. Together with easy accessibility, we highly suggest Pv-BM-MSC is an ideal therapeutic choice for studying porcine animal models.
This internship has helped me to have a broader perspective especially of my lab courses and certain concepts that I learned in textbooks comes into real life in the lab. Those core concepts were the things that actually guide researchers to design experiments and explains conceptually what to expect from experiments. We can contrast the theoretical predictions with the actual experiment that was carries to identify any errors and find better ways to modify the procedures in the experiments. These professional lab also has a professional side and that prepares us to become experts with professional discipline. Therefore this experience gave me sense why we do things in certain ways in labs that cannot be understood by in class labs which were most of the time had many things already done for us.
Performing media changes for cells
Observing the growth of cells
This internship introduced me to the basics of working in a lab such as building hypothesis, designing experiments, analyzing numerical data and visual observations, and maintaining a professional laboratory notebook documenting everything that is being done. I believe these activities develop and create more sounding skills that would be beneficial to reach my future career as to becoming a pharmacist. A pharmacist requires attention to detail like entering and measuring certain ingredients, documenting doctor's prescription that is quite similar to maintaining a lab notebook. The lab that I worked in is maintaining cell banks for MSC stem cells and their inventories needed to be recorded and organized according to their labels that will be an essential in pharmaceutical industry. I quite got used with multitasking that is to run multiple activities simultaneously, due to certain procedures we have to leave certain tasks untouched and prioritize others at times helped me to get a hold of multitasking. If I become a pharmacist I would have to interact with patients, read doctors prescriptions, and managing regulatory protocols. Working in a lab also teaches certain interpersonal communication skills such as following instructions and advises from peers and supervisors and working to reduce conflicts due to certain limited availability of resources and that is something that I would need in the future to work my future career.
However I was not able to network with quite a lot of experts other than the people who actually work in the same site as me. My lab performs many collaborations with many experts from different labs, but my shifts weren't on ideal periods where I got the opportunity to work with other people. Still I managed to make conversations with who are in charge of the research facilities and get some information about what they do and also assist some fellow employees from neighboring labs to move out and dispose certain things from their labs. I managed to get into conversations mostly with the people who were working with me in lab and they gave me new insights about newly projected job opportunities and described the differences between industry and research. They shared some of their accomplishments and gave me tips on how to look out for further opportunities and how to achieve them.