"So my name is TJ Hu, I'm a PhD candidate in the Blelloch Lab.
Right now we're at one of the newer building at UCSF it's the Regenerative Medicine Building,
so I work on prostate cancer.
I'm trying to find novel ways of how prostate cancer cells are able to communicate cells
to allow them to grow better, and if we block these certain signals perhaps we can stop
prostate cancer growth and cure, and hopefully you know, cure or ameliorate the disease.
So I was born in Durham, North Carolina and we moved around but eventually I grew up mostly
in South Carolina.
My mom is a film maker, film producer and my dad is a political science professor, and
I grew up you know, doing everything.
I loved you know, biology, physics classes but I also really liked music.
So I, for high school I went to actually in, like a boarding school for, for the arts,
so I went, I played piano.
I was in an arts high school so I wanted to something to even it out, so I did a summer
research program at Clemson.
That's the university where my father teaches.
I got into this program where I can work with a, a scientist on some of his projects.
What I ended up working on was really, really neat, so I worked on extracellular microRNAs
to be more specific in prostate cancer.
MicroRNAs are thought to only act in the cell, once people found that microRNAs were outside
of the cell, a lot of people initially thought it was junk, and it's just like due to like
cells exploding and releasing all its contents.
But they are beginning to have a lot of studies to figure out these microRNAs may be doing
something and not much is known about this field.
So I got really excited about you know, the new stuff and how it can have a lot of implications
in, in wither bio markers or determining if someone has a disease, but as well as therapeutic
so maybe if you curb some of this release you can help cure, cure the disease.
I mean I think the cool thing about science is there is no typical day, everything depends
on you know, what you found the previous day.
So you know, I get up in the morning and I, and I come to lab and basically I think like,
I plan out what I'm gonna do all day.
Come on in.
So, this is our building for research pod and all these labs have different data.
If we turn around is where me and Symir work.
See right here in between TJ's back to my bench is where we get the collaborations done.
Now this may look like nothing to you but it's a lot of hard work put into the thinking
process and on the benches themselves is where we get a lot of the hard work done.
I think of it, a lab as almost like a playground to discover new things, and I just keep diffing.
You know if I dig and find something neat, I'll keep digging at that same spot.
And you never really know what you're gonna do, until like you know, a week before that
or, or a couple days before that because you can be finding new things all the time.
This really cool new machine that we have is called the nano sight, so it's, it's a
tool to basically characterize and quantify these really small vesicles that I'm looking
at.
So these small vesicles are what stock you carry the mircoRNAs I'm talking about between
cells to cells, and that's just a really novel concept but a lot of trouble is in, in looking
at these little vesicles because they are so small.
They're much smaller than a cell, and they're about 100 nano meters.
I think working in prostate cancer you know, I hope to find some mechanism that's prostate
cancer specific that I can hopefully target with new drugs.
In biology not everything works you know, the first time you try it.
So a lot of when you're doing the experiments, things will fail over and over again, and
really you just need to through that and think about the big picture of, of you know, the
cool exciting new finding that you're on cusp on.
Prostate cancer is the number two you know, killer for, for cancer for men and that's
really you know, it's a really debilitating disease.
And if we can make any ground on improving the, the diagnostics as well as the therapeutics,
I think that would be huge.
You know when I was younger I thought getting a PhD or an MD would be, it would be really
tough.
I never thought that I was like a genius or I was exceptionally smart but you know, I
worked hard, I worked decently hard.
I had a lot of fun in college and you know, I'm still here to day at, at one of the best
institutes in the country.
So yeah, it's definitely doable, you just have to, you really have to enjoy it.
I think that's the thing, you have to have this curiosity of you know, what makes you
know, the human body tick, or what makes biology tick, or you know what makes nature you know
happen and things like that."