Hidden Scientific Research At Worcester State
People are used to hearing about research with the potential to cure or mitigate some of life’s many diseases.
UMass Medical School and Tufts’ Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine’s biosafety lab come to mind when thinking about local academic research to treat or cure diseases.
But it’s also happening at Worcester State College, which is not necessarily a school one thinks of when making a list of local schools conducting scientific research.
Lab Rats
A group of about 20 biology students, under Professor Brad Bryan, have just finished up a cancer biology class where their experiments focused on whether a synthetic small molecule known as Y27632 would have an effect on cancer.
They chose to study the effect on Y27632 because of the body of research data that suggests it should help fight cancer, Bryan said.
“Our question was ‘does it treat or attack melanoma?’” Byran said. After all, 7,700 people in the United States die every year of melanoma, according to national statistics.
While chemotherapy and radiation do knock down between 15 and 20 percent of late stage melanomas, that’s not a fantastic survival rate.
The students found that when melanoma cells are exposed to Y27632, it affects what are called Rho-kinase or ROCK proteins, by restricting the growth of blood vessels, which starve and attack the cancer cells, Bryan said.
The students broke up into five groups and each repeated their experiments five times during the course of the class, and many of their results were repeated. Repeatable results are important in science because they show the outcome is not a fluke.
On their last day of class, senior Lori Ouellette said one of the surprises during the experiments was the nature of the cancer cells.
“You expected them to be these tough cells that can go through anything, but it turns out they’re much more vulnerable than you would think. It’s amazing how fragile they are,” she said.
For some, like senior Alissa Routhier, the class has cemented the idea that she wants to become a cancer researcher. She works in a lab now, but this made her sure she had the right career in mind.
And helping the students finalize their career plans while in the classroom is key, according to Bryan.
“It’s better to find out now that for you, research is boring than during your first job,” Byran said.
Senior Kaitlyn Sullivan was focused solely on becoming a wildlife biologist, but now she knows that she’d also enjoy research, so her career horizons have broadened by taking the class.
There have been constant conversations over the last few years about the need for academia to think more about what certain industries, such as biotechnology, need in their employees. Intersection Of Education, Business
In fact, a few months ago, Worcester State College was the host for an event held by the Colleges of Worcester Consortium about that very topic: interfacing education and the workforce in biomedical, biotechnology and health fields. And Worcester’s own Kevin O’Sullivan, who heads up the Massachusetts Biomedical Initiative, told that audience that colleges and universities always need to be retooling their curriculum with an eye to what is needed in the workforce.
Bryan wants to inspire others to become researchers and he hopes to get the chance to offer more research classes like this one to upperclassmen.
The class and Bryan will also be pulling a paper together laying out their work with the hopes that it will be published by a scientific journal.
It’s an important part of the research cycle and if their work is published, the odds of them getting jobs go up dramatically, Bryan said.
Student Alissa Routhier summed up why the class is important to those who took it: “It’s really important to get hands-on experience and skills that relate more to what you will find in the real world.”
Got news for our Biotech Buzz column? Contact WBJ Staff Writer Eileen Kennedy at ekennedy@wbjournal.com.
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