My name is Hanwei Zhang, I come from Minan, China.
I got training in China in medical school.
I come here to do research.
I work in the UCLA Chin Lab as lab manager.
We focus on three directions.
The first direction is we want to understand the tumor microenvironment.
In normal conditions our immune system would defeat the tumor, but however when a patient
has a bad tumor the immune system is hijacked by the tumor.
It helps the tumor grow faster and it helps the metastasis.
I am from Minan, China.
When I was a child I was very into biology.
During my training in medical school I was especially interested in immunology.
My father is an engineer, my mother is an OBGYN in China.
A lot of times she has saved a patient's life, she's very important.
My brother is also going to medical school.
Actually, human immunology is a very amazing system.
If your immune system over-responds you have been hit by an autoimmune disease like type-1
diabetes, like arthritis.
However, if there is not enough immune response, you have a change of being hit by the tumor.
So I am working to understand the immune system.
As a lab manager I handle the whole lab most of the stuff, and I help with any questions
and I also have my own project.
Last year we published three paper.
It was very good.
First we used models to understand the tumor microenvironment and how it interplays with
the tumor.
Second, we want to discover new methods of drug signatures to attack the biocancer stem
cells.
Right now we are focused on biomarkers for cancer patient early diagnosis, and we want
to use this biomarker to screen a drug for patient personal treatment.
We collaborate with different labs, we collaborate with graduate students and undergraduate students.
The accomplishment we want is the medicine, the cure for cancer patients.
It's a good job but it's a little hard.
You need to be smart and you need to be patient.
It requires everything.