My name is Lindsey Brinton, I'm a graduate student at the University of Virginia, here
I study pancreatic cancer in the laboratory of Dr. Kimberley Kelly, and I am looking at
the cells that surround tumor cells in order to see if we can use them to find cancer before
it's too late to treat it.
So trying to improve the survival of patients with pancreatic cancer.
As a little kid I was an extremely curious person.
I apparently talked non-stop and most of what came out of my mouth were questions.
My mindset has always been very, how do things work? what's going on? and as I got older
I was even more struck by the human body and how intricate and complex it is, and I wanted
to understand how it worked.
I liked medicine, I've always liked medicine.
I've always like science and math really.
So when I was getting into college I sort of combined my two loves.
I loved math so I chose engineering and I loved medicine so I chose biomedical engineering.
And it wasn't actually until I got into that Major specifically that I saw how valuable
the research aspect is, so I decided that for me I wanted to go into graduate studies
so I could be involved in the innovative part.
I wanted to be involved in developing new treatments and developing new strategies for
diseases and in the process of changing things.
The project that I'm working on is dealing with this very big problem where patients
get diagnosed with pancreatic cancer much, much too late.
By the time somebody's been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer it's already usually past
the treatment window.
My role is looking at kind of a different compartment of tumors.
Tumors have stroma cells, they have tumor cells, they have immune cells that make up
this environment that cancer lives in.
As the tumor gets more advanced some of the cells can break off the tumor and invade the
tissue that's around the tumor.
And eventually these cells can circulate around the body.
If they find an area where they can thrive they can develop a metastasis there in that
new spot and that makes it much, much more difficult to treat.
And so I am looking at these cells and trying to target them.
And so I basically use a screening tool, you can think of it as a bunch of keys, and I
throw them on a cell until I've found ones that are successful at targeting the tumor
cell.
Once I have this key, this target, then I will be able to use it in order to take an
image of the tumor, and also to potentially deliver some kind of drug to the tumor.
There are things that are awesome about working in a lab, in that we're really at the cutting
edge the things that we're doing could help real people they're things that are very translational
in meaning, the things that I do in the lab I expect can go into the clinic.
But it has its challenges too, the majority of the experiments that we do fail.
You fail and fail and fail and fail and fail, and it's not until you've done something ad
nauseam that it actually works.
It can be extraordinarily frustrating, especially when you want so much to be solving a problem
and that problem is not getting solved very quickly.
But I would say at graduate school endurance and perseverance are very important.
I just have to constantly remind myself of the big picture, what I'm trying to do, and
remember that you learn from failure and that many of the failures will eventually lead
to success.
I think that one thing that many people overlook is finding their passion.
If you have an interest in science and if you're trying to pursue that interest, there
are so many different fields that you can go into.
There are so many different types of research.
The possibilities are really endless.
You have the opportunity to test things out and figure out what really resonates with
you, and it's important to allow yourself many experiences in different fields in order
to figure out one that you're really passionate about.
Because it can be frustrating to fail so often and because it can take endurance and perseverance,
it's really important to have the passion driving it, and if you find what you're passionate
about you'll succeed.