"My name is Nicholas Popp.
We are currently at the National Eye Institute in the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda,
Maryland.
I am working on a disease called Age-Related Macular Degeneration which is an eye disease
that effects about 5% of the population.
What we are doing right now is trying to figure out why people get it and what we can do to
treat it.
I'm originally from rural southern Illinois, basically in the corn fields, and there's
not much science going on around there.
I didn't really get any introduction to it until I went to college, actually.
I went to the University of Chicago.
When I was there during my second year, I got introduced to a basic research experience
through a summer program and I fell in love with it.
My boss, very first day, took out a model of a protein.
He basically fit in two halves, pulled it apart, turned it about 30 degrees, and snapped
it back together.
He said, ""When the protein does this, the cell dies."" That small movement, literally
like 30 degrees, was absolutely fascinating to me because it meant that something as small
as a twist could determine the cell fate and how that would happen in humans later on.
If you have a lot of cells do that, then they die.
That can lead to a lot of different problems like the disease we are studying here.
With people who have AMD, it could lead all the way to complete blindness.
Typically, what we see, though, is you start losing your central vision right where I would
be looking at your face and not so much on your periphery, things that you detect with
motion.
What will happen is as your eyes begin to deteriorate more and more, that will actually
begin to expand and so you will start losing more and more vision centrally radiating outward.
In terms of the disease genetics, we are trying to figure out which ones have it.
If we can get one of those and get one of those published, then we have something that
can be quickly moved into the clinic and be used as a diagnostic in the future.
On most day-to-day basis, I am actually in here doing a lot of things like looking at
different histology slides of samples that we have taken from like eyes or we have some
patient samples that will come in as well.
Other times, I'm actually trying to validate this in other ways.
So, we're using it to test the same drug on the human cell lines ... Sort of give us some
more pre-clinical data and I do that over in the cell culture hood ... Lots of pipe
heading, lots of taking care of cells in the incubator, very typical basic lab stuff.
We do have some very great images that are fluorescently labeled so you can see how the
cells look based on different based on where different proteins are expressed in the
cell ... Right here I have a set of what are called
RPE cells, Retinal Pigmented Epithelial.
You can see that they are really, really dark.
These are actually from a human patient that came in a few months back and what I do is
I basically just have to change the media on these.
I'm sort of just ... This is basic what you do with some culture stuff: you just keep
them alive.
I'm just going to be changing the media so they don't get sick and die.
Everything in here has to be extremely sterile so anything that goes in has to be wiped down
with ethanol.
Anything that comes out has to be taken care of.
This is a special media that one of the other labs in the National Eye Institute has developed
for these cells to make sure that they don't go bad.
I can't tell you most of what's in it because it's a lot of chemicals but it's nice and
bright red.
I actually have a rare disease, and that's been a big motivating factor.
For me, looking forward, being able to get this experience here, where I've been able
to do some basic drug trials, is really fascinating ... Has really kept me going on that path
and sort of solidified that that's what I'm going to do going forward.
There is, actually, a lot of collaboration in this lab.
We just did the injections this morning right?
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nicholas: So around the twenty-first, is that probably good?
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
You're talking about the funduscope right?
Nicholas: Yes, we are talking about the funduscope, so we will take picture of the retina and
see if any of the legions have changed.
We get samples from all over the world, not just from locally.
Last week, we had some samples come in from Italy.
We look at those, we analyze them, we get back to the doctors, and we say, ""Here, this
is what's going on with your patient.
We can tell because of this."" We also have projects going on with Kansas City, out in
Oregon ... All over the world.
It's really a collaborative environment.
It's been pretty great for me here.
Honestly, what makes me so excited about it is because I can do so many things with research.
I'm at the cutting edge of what is happening and what is known.
If somebody comes in with a rare disease to NIH, I can be one of the first people to look
at it and say, ""We see this and this is what that means for this patient."" Take some time
to explore science.
If you're really interested in it, there are so many different things that you can do and
so many different ways you can look at how things work, how the body works, or what can
go wrong that there's something you'll find in there that you'll like.