"My name is Brandyn Castro.
I work here at UCSF in the Helen Diller Cancer Research building in the lab or Dr. Manish
Aghi.
Here in this lab we specifically focus on brain tumor research, glioblastoma is a brain
tumor that we primarily work on.
He also does research on pituitary tumors.
We look at development of chemotherapy like resistance to Avastin in these tumors.
I wanted to go into medicine ever since I was very young.
It started when my Nana had cancer and I was first learning about that.
Even at a young age I know I want to do something meaningful with my life and that translated
to me wanting to become a physician.
Over the course of the years I started developing my interest in neuroscience and neurology
and then subsequently neuro-surgery.
I just kept going down that path, studying in undergrad I was a neuroscience major and
just have never strayed away from that neuroscience.
We look at the tumor micro environment so the area around the tumor cells and how that
may impact the development of resistance to the chemotherapy agent.
I specifically look at microglial cells which are a type of immune cell.
The theory is that these cells may not be attacking the tumor, that they may be helping
the tumor become more invasive because we found higher levels of microglial in the resistant
tumors.
We are looking at using staining.
I take actual tissue slices and I stain for different markers, one of which actually looks
at the microglial cells and it picks up those cells so I can use antibodies and fluorescent
markers to look at it under the microscope.
Another thing that we're doing now is genetic manipulation so we use tools that allow us
to take out genes out of cells and then we can see how the cells behave when they don't
have that gene involved so you can see how fast they move, how fast they divide or invasion,
how fast they move through tissue.
There's kind of like a break, the cells over here and this kind of space in the cells over
here.
Then we image at various time points to see how quickly the cells close that gap.
The idea is that if we can find different genes that impact the way the tumor behaves
that we might be able to create a drug that can affect that.
There is no cure for glioblastoma right now.
It's very unfortunate but right now our primary goal is to improve the quality of life of
these patients and also prolong their life.
What we have to do is find out why these tumors aren't responding to different drugs and if
we figure out why then we can compare those mechanisms.