At the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre
we are committed to fostering a culture of research at the
very earliest stages of medical training we host the Inspire programme a programme of
training opportunities designed by medical and dental graduates
for medical and dental graduates.
Joining me today are Tarini Ratneswaren and the Nelema Begum both Inspire programme awardees.
Tarini, you're what year in medical school?
I've just completed my final year.
Very good. And you applied for this Inspire award last year, what were your plans at that point?
I was going elective to the functional neurosurgery laboratory at Columbia
Medical Centre in New York.
And what was the project that you chose to work on there?
So in this project we were basically using electrodes implanted
deep within the brain to measure electrical activity from parts of the brain that we haven't been
able to study before. So patients will be asked to do a task, a behavioral task, and then
we can measure electrical activity from neurons and populations of neurons to see which
areas were firing and how they were firing to sort of understand a bit about
human cognition how we make decisions.
And these patients had what condition?
So these are patients with epilepsy who are undergoing surgery for epilepsy and
beforehand we use this technique to find out where the seizures are coming from
and how they are propagating.
And what was your role in this research project?
So I was coordinating manuscript for a video journal to document how you can use these techniques
to investigate the brain. I got to work with all the different parts of the teams,
so the neurosurgeon, neurophysiologists and also got to go and learn how to actually run
the payroll tasks for the patient.
So you were in New York for for how long in all?
Ten and a half weeks.
So it was a good experience to... sort of about laboratory approaches and
clinical research programmes?
Now Nelema, what year are you in at medical school?
I've also just finished
You've just finished? Congratulations.
And you decided to stay at
King's College London and you were awarded a summer studentship tell me about that project.
So I was based at Guy's Hospital in the St John's Institute of Dermatology.
And what was the project specifically looking at?
So we were investigating into looking for mutations that were driving a particular
type of skin cancer called cutaneous t-cell lymphoma.
And I understand that the group that you are working with, are sort of
international leaders in this field so it must have been a very stimulating
environment tell me about the techniques that you learned in the lab.
Definitely. The techniques that I used were primarily something called PCR so what we do is we
process the DNA from patients who have this cutaneous t-cell lymphoma and then
what we do is we
code the DNA bases and then we compare it to the database that exists which is
called the human genome project and by doing that we can identify mutations and
then investigate that further to see whether or not these mutations had a
role in the disease progression.
And the idea is to try and catalogue all the different mutations you see in
in different patients. What were the sort of conclusions you came to with your project?
So this project has been going on for about 10 years and by
the end of this project we were able to identify and sort through hundreds of
mutations to about 20 very important mutations that could potentially be
driving this cancer.
And presumably the goal longer term would be to use this post
as perhaps a diagnostic tool and perhaps for the treatment is that the idea?
Absolutely yeah so first of all we would be using it to see how patients might
respond to medication and also by finding out the mutations and how it
impacts the body
we can actually create pharmaceutical interventions to hopefully try and
regress or slow down the way in which that this disease progresses.
Now you've qualified, what sort of impact will this research experience have do you think on your future career?
Prior to applying for this scholarship I was very interested in
pursuing a career in dermatology. Dermatology is a very sort of
competitive area of medicine to get into so being able to get the support from
the Inspire programme has completely given me a platform to pursue this, sort of aspiration that I have.
Tarini, Nelema, thank you very much for telling us about your Inspire programme studentship.
So you can see that Tarini and Nelema's experiences are just two good
examples of providing a research culture very early on in the stage of their
medical training. It's great for their CVs but I think a great opportunity for
others to take up these research training opportunities very early on in
their undergraduate medical training careers.