I have 2 weeks left until my program at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center ends, which is when I will present a poster highlighting my work at the annual Capstone Symposium. There will be 100 students presenting their work at this competition. As far as my experience here is concerned, I have since changed projects because my previous experiment did not pan out. As mentioned in my previous post, I had tried to inject fatty tissue loaded with IL-10 (chemical messenger) into wounds to induce wound healing and prevent scar formation. While I had done a literature search on the subject and followed similar protocols to those online, I had difficulties isolating specific components of the fat. Now, I am working on a project where I basically load IL-10 into a gel that was previously developed by the lab, which can be applied topically to wounds. I bought mice from a supplier, created 3 wounds on the back of the mice (located on either side of the spine and behind the head), and then injected the gel into one wound (the other two were used as a controls). After 7 days, I humanely euthanized the mice following standard protocol and collected the wounds. I am currently in the process of staining the samples, and when I finish this and have analyzed the data I will post my findings on here. I also realized I haven’t posted any photos, so I am going to fix that now.

This is my work desk:

This is my lab space:

This is one of the many surgery rooms in the veterinary facility:

Lastly, this is a picture of the lab:

 

Overall, it has been an exciting, fast-paced summer, and I look forward to sharing my findings with the rest of my peers and the scientific community.

-Chad