Drug and Antibody Combination

Drug and Antibody Combination

Hello Harbour Friends! This week was very exciting, I looked at the results from the previous weeks plates where I administered drug and antibody therapy to the cells.

First off I have 2 new cell lines. I will test these cells and share the results next week. On my plate, all the wells grew fine, except for a single well, it was contaminated with nasty fungus. We checked each well under a microscope and what was surprising, was that the fungus killed most of the cancer cells! Of course, this would not make effective therapy, as it will also kill just as many normal cells, but it was still an interesting result. I ate lunch and came back to organize my notes. I had a bunch of sticky notes stuck to a page, but Mr. Choh says that if I went into a laboratory as a student with these notes that the professor would not even let me in the lab. So I spent a good hour putting all these sticky notes down on my lab book in pen and pencil.  I’ll post images of my newly organized notebook soon.

After this, I did an MMT assay, it is hard to explain, but it is basically a chemical that reacts in each well, based on how many cells have metabolic activity. I’ll post a picture to give you guys a better idea of what it looks like. MMT assay basically has a chemical that gets reduced within the cell via hydrogen bond. The beginning chemical is called 3-{4,5-demethylthiazol-2-yl}-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide which is also known as MTT. I don’t expect anyone to be able to pronounce this because even with my knowledge of chemistry, I can barely manage to stumble through pronouncing these words myself. The mitochondrial reductase changes this to {E,Z}-5-{4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl}-1,3-diphenylformazan which is also known as Formazan. I just call it Formazan. 

The Bromide ion breaks off and the nitrogen bonds change as the bond at the 4 position breaks its bond with the nitrogen at the 6 position, the nitrogen at 6 binds to a hydrogen. This hydrogen changes the markers chemical composition which changes its color, this acts as the indicator as seen above. 

Thanks for reading, again, comments are welcome and I’ll be sure to respond. 

Thank you, Aaron J.