After my fun weekend trip, it was time for me to get started on my
work. For the drug encapsulation project, I hope to encapsulate Avastin
for treatment of wet AMD. Avastin is a commonly used cancer treatment drug and
is not clinically used to treat wet AMD. This drug is being used because it is
easy to image the drug and it provides Anti-VEGF therapy. Before I start doing
experiments, I need to do a lot of reading so that I can determine what
materials would be best to encapsulate and image Avastin. I have also been
reading journal
article to help me develop a protocol for my experiment. The goal is to
eventually perform an animal study to determine how the encapsulated drug
reacts in the eye.
For my second project, I have begun research on the anatomy of
the eye. Once I have the CAD drawings of the eye, it will be possible to use a
3D printer to create a model of the eye that could be used for a lot of
different tests. Before this happens, I will be printing a model that has
roughly the same dimensions of the eye to ensure that the 3D printer will be
suitable to create this model. On Tuesday night I went to a meeting and
discussed this project. There are other students that will be able to teach me how
to use the 3D printer. I was also able to attend a seminar on Tuesday morning about the
development of nanotechnology for biological and disease studies. Meetings such
as this one can be challenging because people are talking in Chinese. Luckily,
the PowerPoint was written in English so I could still learn from the seminar.
I appreciate meetings that are in Professor Xu’s lab because everyone has made
an incredible effort to speak in English as much as they can and to put the
PowerPoint slides in English!
On Tuesday I also created a QQ account! QQ is used to chat
with friends online, and is very popular in China. The other students were very
excited that I got an account because they said it would be much easier for
them to communicate with me. This application also allows for group chats, so
now it is much easier for me to keep up to date with what is going on in the
lab.
Below is a photo of some of the students from the lab. This
photo is very hard to see, so I will try to take a better one for my next blog!
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