My Top Five from the SelectScience 2023 VR event
by Janny Marie L Peterslund, CCO at SnapCyte Solutions Inc.
Yes, I won’t make you scroll endlessly through the post to find my top five and decide whether you actually needed this information! I will just give it to you right here in the first paragraph.
Highlights:
- It might actually be worth attending a VR meeting – who would have thought!?
- Precision Medicine, Drug-Repurposing and Combination Therapy Stole My Attention
- Cool 3D Co-Culture with Vascularization – Those Engineers are Serious about their of Breast Tumoroid Models
- Using Plants as Anti-Cancer treatment seems rather interesting
- Nice Swag Bag Feature! And This is How I Would Go Again?
Below, you can dig into the what and why of each of these insights.
It Might Actually be Worth Attending a VR Meeting - Who Would have Thought!?
Precision Medicine, Drug-Repurposing and Combination Therapy Stole My Attention!
Cool 3D Co-Culture with Vascularization - Those Engineers are Serious about Their of Breast Tumoroid Models
Yup, stick a bunch of engineers together with bio-science people and some wicked cell techniques and you can mimic a breast tumour! Poster #3 by Dr. Mariana V Magelhães et al.: ‘Integrating Vascularization into a 3D Heterotypic Breast Cancer Model: a bioengineering approach’, caught my eye. Studying the vascularization of tumours in an in-vitro model similar to the breast cancer niche is just cool in my opinion!
Using Plants as Anti-Cancer treatment seems rather interesting
OK, so I’m no cancer researcher, and maybe this is why I am completely new to the use of plant extracts in serious scientific approaches!? But it is pretty interesting to test (ancient) herbal medicines and see what potential they hold as anti-inflammatory and apoptosis-inducing agents.
The summit had two posters on the topic: ‘Caralluma europaea effects on apoptosis and chemoresistance in pancreatic cancer cells‘ (poster #5) and ‘Using Plants as Anti-Cancer treatment’ (poster #11).
These plant extracts would be interesting to dig into some more, in that they did show effects in traditional 2D carcinogenic cell cultures of pancreatic or cervical cancer cells. This needs to be further confirmed in more relevant models or animal studies, but suggest that a combinatorial treatment approach with known cancer drugs and these plant extracts combined is an exciting approach.
Nice Swag Bag Feature! And This is How I Would Go Again?
You might be wondering how they managed to hand out Swag Bags at a VR event. Well, I got confused at first too, since I saw the +Swag Bag icon all over and then did not actually see anything being added or downloaded anywhere when I clicked it.
Soon, however, I found the Swag Bag section of the menu bar and there were all the posters, tool presentations, tech notes, data sheets, interview videos and all sorts of other info pieces you might want to revisit. It is neat to gather info pieces while perusing the site and revisit them once time allows (yeah, let’s see how many times I actually come back to investigate!).
All in all, I think I would attend an online event like this again. The main thing I will look for next time, is which companies are presenting and what tools they have that I am interested in knowing more about. From there, I will look at presentation videos, whitepapers or tech notes to better understand the application of the tool, i.e. collecting a Swag Bag full of stuff! That could be really helpful, I think.
Unfortunately, without a specific purpose, a meeting like this does become a bit boring at times, as I am missing all the human interaction that is half of what a conference is about for me, honestly! Having a rendezvous with random fellow scientists and discovering we have common interests (or similar bio-break schedules!) is just really engaging and sparks my excitement for attending, I realize.
How about you?
References
- M Le Compte, et al.: Multiparametric Tumor Organoid Drug Screening Using Widefield Live-Cell Imaging for Bulk and Single-Organoid Analysis. Cancer Res., 2022. doi: 10.3791/64434
- R Zauner, et al.: Transcriptome-Guided Drug Repurposing for Aggressive SCCs. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2022, 23(2), 1007. doi: 10.3390/ijms23021007
