Hi, I'm Emily and I'm currently doing my Master's Thesis at the German Cancer Research Center.
At the moment I'm doing a lot of cell culture because my project includes biology
and I'm working on combination therapies so I try to combine the irradiation with different
concentrations of DNA repair inhibitors to create a synergistic effect of both
and for that I'm doing so-called clonogenic assays. I plate cells and
I can fix and stain them in the end and then I can count the surviving colonies
and for that I can determine the survival fraction in the end and see how many cells
survive with the different concentrations and in combination with the irradiation.
These are some examples of my plates and this one here for example is from a pancreatic cancer cell
line where I tried to irradiate at two Gray and I used a first concentration which was higher than
the second one and here in the first concentration there are lots more of colonies. It means the
second concentration worked in combination with the irradiation. Additionally, I will do this in
3D because tumors are also growing in 3D so I'm going to create so-called spheroids and I will
observe the increase and the shrinkage of their size and this is called a growth delay essay.
I like most about my project that it includes a lot of practical work. I really have to plan my
own experiments. I have to look after the cells and I have to look if my experiments work or not
and in the end I have to do my own analysis. And I really like that in medical physics a lot of
different fields work together. I really get to know how to apply physics and biology here.
I have a lot of colleagues who are biologists chemists physicists and medical students as well.
My daily challenges include the work with the cells because if you slightly change something
in the environment of the experiment, it can happen that the cells behave totally different so
you have to be very accurate at working with the experiment. And the biological experiments, they
take a lot of time so in the end if it didn't work you have to repeat the whole experiment again.
you