All in a day's work

As most of you know, my day job is cancer reasearch.

pretty vague.

I mean, you can guess I work with cancer.

and it's probably a lab.

but what EXACTLY do I do for 40 hours a week?

well, I will show you.

We have mice that we work with.

Over 3,000 of them.

On Mondays and Tuesdays we change their cages.

In a sterile enviorment.

Because, you see, these mice are no normal mice.

They have no hair--they are nude. 

(Think pinky and the brain style)

they also have no immune system, which makes them great for cancer research, as most cancer patients have little to no immune response because of chemo and radiation. 

This is what is looks like:

 

These are two different days, but it looks like this on Monday and Tuesday.  We have three different hoods--which is what you see here.  Each hood has a person that "goes under"--aka the sterile person that changes the cages.  (That's the guy in the blue gown).  Then there is the assister--they bring the person under all the cages to change. 

FYI: I am a person that "goes under" but it's hard to take a picture of yourself if you are sterile. 

This takes pretty much the full two days. 

The rest of the week, I do the more "traditional" research.  Lab bench, gloves, boiling potions, etc.

It looks like this:

I am currently working on isolating a protein.

Our drug is very toxic in its active form, and so we have to create a differernt form (that is less toxic) to give to patiens.

There is a protein that activates this less toxic form into the active form naturally in the body.  When this works, we see great results. 

We want to isolate this protein so we can give more of it to patients on our drug.

That's kind of what I do in a nutshell.

Thanks for visitng the lab with me today!

Don't forget to go enter yourself in some giveaways!
The Sweetest Petunia  and Naptime Diaries