The Telomeres

Hello and welcome to the final blog!

This week, we resolved our issues, made great headway, and ate some lunch while we were at it.

Firstly, we definitely corrected the issue from last week of high density v. low density. I plated a lower density experiment to be analyzed, and the results have been interesting (but that’s for the presentation). Luckily, we were able to use the high density results for the good of the project, instead of letting it go to waste. The higher density, although it did not show quite as much of a reduction in the MYC protein which actually drives the cancer and causes proliferation, showed a definite reduction in the IRF4 protein, which is the protein the drug was meant to target. If you remember, in previous blogs I mentioned that IRF4 drove the production of MYC in multiple myeloma. So, the purpose of the drug was to target IRF4, reducing it so that MYC would subsequently be reduced and the cancer would die off. So, what we saw is that the drug was working—but that, in high density settings, there still remained enough IRF4 for the MYC to be produced and the cancer to continue its proliferation.

So, when we began experimenting on the lower density cells, we saw a dramatic decrease in cell proliferation after 6 days of drug treatment (a promising sign that MYC was knocked down). However we also got some strange results after putting the cells through some flow cytometry, which analyzes each cell in a sample individually. And those results should be revealed in the presentation.

Until then, thank you for reading!

Angela