Perry Katsarakes / Dr. Rohit Chandwani - Week 7

Much like last week, this week I continued observing Dr. Chandwani in both the OR and the clinic. As usual it was wonderful to watch Dr. Chandwani's work as he operated seamlessly to remove cancer and helped his various patients at all stages of the recovery process. While I haven't spent much time discussing it in my blog posts, I also attended some meetings with Dr. Heller's lab and learned more about the many different research projects going on. One interesting ongoing study in his lab is examining whether or not the contents of blood serum can be used as a diagnostic tool for multiple sclerosis. By collecting data from hundreds of MS patients and using artificial intelligence to compare their serum content, this project hopes to make the MS diagnosis process much more reliable, cheap, and efficient. Another amazing experiment happening in Dr. Heller's lab involves the development of a therapy-agnostic cytokine sensor. The measurement of cytokines can be a valuable tool in diagnosing and treating immune system disorders, and a variety of different methods have been developed to achieve this purpose. However, many of these disorders are treated with therapies that confound these methods, leading to inaccurate readings and thus preventing doctors from gaining this valuable information about the status of their immune system. Using a unique sensor combining photosensitive carbon nanotubes with machine learning, Dr. Heller's lab hopes to produce a technique that can accurately detect cytokine levels even in the presence of confounding therapeutics. These are just a few of the exciting studies ongoing in Dr. Heller's lab, and I'm excited at the prospect of potentially working with them in the future once I officially begin my Ph.D. at Cornell!

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