My summer trip to the islets of Pancreas

So you wanted me to give you a brief summary of what I did this summer. I tried to compile a list of all of the different things... but I'll try to keep it concise for you. I suppose I could start by describing what the lab does in general.

The lab is in the hospital on the UIC med campus, and they specialize in islet isolation. They're the lead partner in The Chicago Project, which is a multinational effort to cure diabetes in 5 years. The strategy is to isolate the islets from a patient's pancreas, through removal and digestion of the pancreas, and inject them into the hepatic portal vein. From here they can secrete insulin (which is their function), thus regulating the blood sugar of the patient and giving them the ability to go off of insulin treatments. However, as of right now, this process is still very inefficient. It takes two complete donor pancreata to take one person off of insulin for a few years. (Just to state a somewhat necessary point, a big reason why islet transplant is preferential is because it is a much simpler surgical procedure - relatively speaking - than an entire pancreas transplant.)

This is where our research is currently. The doctor that I worked with closely, Dr. Qi, is doing much research in the area of islet encapsulation in an alginate material, hopefully providing numerous benefits to the patient, including enabling them to go off immunosuppressive drugs, which are clearly debilitating as they increase the patient's susceptibility to illness. The capsule is thought of as a physical immunosuppressive agent. If the capsule is engineered in specific ways, the possibility of using bovine islets (or other animals I suppose) could become a reality, significantly increasing the number of people that could be treated.

Now for what I actually did this summer. My second day there I watched a baboon pancreatectomy and islet isolation, which was so amazing. Dr. Qi then took those islets and sent them to Norway to be encapsulated. When we received the encapsulated islets, Dr. Qi transplanted them into NOD mice that we had made diabetic a few days earlier. We then tracked the blood glucose in the mice for a few weeks before they were so diabetic that we had to sacrifice them. I actually did blood glucose testing and recorded this data. Before sacrificing the animals, Dr. Qi would remove the pancreas for staining.

I did a whole lot immunohistochemistry over the summer, and I've pretty much done the whole process. I embedded the pancreas (or liver, etc. in other experiments) in paraffin, cut the blocks to make slides, dewaxed the slides, and applied H/E (or other) staining to them. When doing a different stain (BrdU and others, I can't remember the specifics), we'd tag a florescent probe to the stain, take pictures, and count the various types of cells. I also did a lot of cutting the paraffin blocks in an (unsuccessful and exhaustive) effort to find the capsules that were supposedly there. Not my favorite week!

I watched a few human islet isolations, which were also very excitingl. The picture that I sent is me in the clean room, which is where the isolations take place. What I'm wearing is what everyone that ever enters the room has to wear, whether doing an isolation, cleaning the facility, or simply walking in to get anything. After we had isolations, we'd have to do various tests on the islets as well as count how many we isolated. I've done the counting as well as static glucose tests.

In addition to the surgery the second day I was there, I watched two or three additional surgeries throughout the summer, and I prepared the enzyme that we use to perfuse the pancreas during some of the baboon surgeries.

After all of this, I actually got to witness a human pancreatectomy at the end of the summer. It was awesome, for lack of a better word. I loved it! I could probably go on about that for another page, but I won't. If you have any questions or would like me to explain anything further to you, I'd be happy to do it. It's hard putting experiences and emotion into writing, but I really had an amazing summer.

What's next? At this point I'm beginning a new project on campus in Urbana, working with Dr. Kevin Kim in the Thin Film and Particle Research Lab (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering). The project is still in development, but will include using nanoparticles to locate cancer cells in the body. The goal is to use these particles to help tumors show up on MRIs. Future possibilities include using these particles for localized chemotherapy.

-- Trisha Hadley