April 26, 2017

During the recent Carver College of Medicine Research Week, a contest was held for the best Creative Cover Art. Specifically, CCOM Research Week participants were invited to submit a mini-poster in the form of a journal cover that best depicts their research project. Two members of the Weizhou Zhang Lab won first and second prize in this competition with Nick Borcherding taking first and Kawther Ahmed second place. Their covert art and descriptions are below.

Targeted therapy in the age of precision medicine
Nicolas Borcherding
My research project focuses on using and applying large data to develop unconventional targets for aggressive cancers, like basal-like breast cancer and ovarian serous adenocarcinoma. These cancers are highly-metastatic and are generally resistant to therapies. The mainstay of treatment is surgery with or sans broad cytotoxic chemotherapies. Often these therapies are unable to prevent relapse of disease. By using patient data, we are able to find efficacious targeted therapies, which minimize relapse potential and reduce the off-target effects of chemotherapies. The cover consists of a circos plot or linkage plot, a method of displaying multidimensional or multiplatform patient samples, as a crosshair aiming at ovarian serous adenocarcinoma cells. 

Single cell RNA-sequencing of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes
Kawther Ahmed
Single cell RNA sequencing is a powerful tool capable of identifying unique cell populations otherwise unidentifiable by whole tissue RNA sequencing. Single cell RNA sequencing of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes can detangle the complex profile of this heterogeneity cell population and point out distinct sub-population contributing to cancer progression and treatment.