My name is Steven Abboud, right now we're in the urologic oncology lab at one of the
small tissue labs. So, I'm combatting a couple different diseases here that are urological
diseases. In terms of my lab projects, what I have going is a disease that's called hereditary
leomiomitosis and renal salt carcinoma. So this is a particularly aggressive disease.
It effects women really noticeably because it will give you skin tumors, tumors in the
uterus, and it will also give you renal salt carcinoma. And so, my main focus when I got
here, was to work on a treatment for this disease. And then on the clinical side, we're
looking at prostate cancer, so this is huge. I was born in the San Francisco Bay area.
I'm from a small town called Pleasanton. So from an early age, I was really interested
in science. I was always one of those kids that wanted to figure out how things work,
and so I really knew that I was going to do something scientific. I didn't really know
what, but it was in high school that I really started to focus in that I wanted to do something
in medical science. I found the diseases that we read about in biology, although it wasn't
very in depth, but I thought â€œYou know, here's a real opportunity for us to discover
a lot of things. We don't know how the human body works. We had to discover it all. Versus,
if you're an engineer, you design what you're working on. And so, I went to St. Louis
University in St. Louis Missouri, and it was there I majored in biology initially, and
after I got into my first year, I switched my major to medical science so I could get
the most specific training that I could get to become a physician, and I started to spend
time doing research. And I was looking at what projects could I find, not only interesting
for me, it's what's applicable? So here you're looking at cancer cells, actually, and what's
going on is that they're growing and sticking on to the bottom of this plate. And what you
see on the screen are cancer cells. So that's what's growing on your body, and we have it
growing here, at the bottom of this dish. And that way, we can test our treatments here.
For these patients with hereditary leomiomitosis and renal salt carcinoma, we're definitely
working for a treatment, and hopefully we'll have a therapy that we can give patients very
soon. My work here in the lab is very collaborative. Any projects that we're doing, there's just
a number of people that I'm working with, because these projects are huge, you can't
do it alone. On a day-to-day basis, I'll collaborate with the post-doctoral fellows, and as well
as some of the younger people that are in their post-baccalaureate training, as well
as some of the other medical students and we all collaborate to try to make these projects
happen. What I find really inspiring about being here and the projects that I'm working
on, is that all the things that I am working on, I know that they are going to dramatically
affect the lives of patients. Even if it's minorly significant and it's not going to
get me an award or anything like that, but my lesson is it's going to affect the lives
of patients positively. And to me, I mean, that's really what's inspiring about this.