Week 1

This week is my first week working at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center as part of Cornell’s Biomedical Engineering Immersion Program. This summer I am working with Dr. Jason Spector who is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon. In addition to shadowing him in both the clinic and Operating Room, I am working in his lab developing a collaborative project between his lab and my PhD lab in Ithaca, the Cosgrove Lab. The beginning of the week started off with shadowing Dr. Spector in the clinic, which is when he sees patients in his office. One theme that was common in many of his patients was the importance on wound healing. After all different types of surgeries, the main concern with the follow-up visits was wound care and healing. One patient had their Achilles tendon torn and required surgery. Unfortunately, the wound became infected and that is why they had come to see Dr. Spector.

As part of their care, this patient was treated with a vacuum-assisted wound closure device. This device works by applying a negative pressure to the wound which helps with wound healing in several different ways. The vacuum helps to remove the exudate materials which helps to cleanse the wound. In addition, the mechanical forces that the device puts on the wound promotes healing. The mechanical forces applied to the wound draw the wound edges together and at the cellular level, cell stretch has been shown to facilitate cell migration and proliferation which leads to granulation tissue formation. Throughout the week, I saw this same device used on many patients after all sorts of different procedures where enhanced wound healing is desired. One patient, pictured below, had this device used on top of sutures after an abdominal hernia repair surgery. This was really interesting for me to see a basic science concept of understanding how cells react to mechanical forces be applied to a medical device used on patients to help promote healing. It was inspiring to see biomedical engineering at work and being utilized to help patients in the clinic.

 

Just in this first week, I have really seen the benefit of having strong clinician-research partnerships. I think being in the clinic and seeing the current care patients receive better helps me think of ways biomedical engineers can help. Sometimes when you are so removed from the patient care, it can be hard to know what is needed and it can be difficult to remember how your work will someday help patients. This experience has provided me with extra inspiration to see the patients that my work could one day benefit. In addition, through a collaboration with Dr. Spector, our lab is able to attain human patient muscle samples to use in our research. It is important to use human samples to better translate our work one day to humans. With patient consent, during surgery, Dr. Spector is able to take a muscle sample from the patient, which then, a senior student in our lab, digests and dissociates to isolate the cells for single cell RNA sequencing experiments. Today, I got to be part of this procedure, watching the surgery, and then carrying the tissue sample over to my lab member a few streets away in lab.

In addition to these mentioned experiences, I was able to attend morning rounds with the residents and medical students and saw all sorts of different surgeries with Dr. Spector. It was really surprising to see the different types of surgeries a plastic surgeon does. The surgeries varied from a breast reduction surgery to a surgery for treatment of a bronchopleural fistula. Today, I attended the first lab meeting with Dr. Spector’s lab. It is exciting to see the correlation between the work being done in the lab and the patient conditions seen in the clinic. My reagents and cell lines arrived from Ithaca today on the campus to campus bus so I am excited to get started on my summer research project now and looking forward to the future clinical experiences this summer!