Saniya C. Pendharkar
JRF
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MSc (Area): Biotechnology
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saniyacp@gmail.com
I have obtained my M.Sc. degree in Biotechnology from Mount Carmel College, Bengaluru in 2018. After which, I secured a Post-graduate Diploma in Cellular and Molecular Diagnostics under the aegis of Biotechnology Skill Enhancement Programme (BiSEP), Government of Karnataka from the Oxford College of Science, Bengaluru in 2019. I then my completed six months of Industry Internship in the laboratory of Thermo Fisher Scientific, Bangalore during April-October 2019, where I was trained in the handling of protein extractions, and Western blot-based analysis. At CSBMM, I am working towards establishing tumoroids from tumor cell lines of lung cancer.
Experience
- Worked as an intern in ThermoFisher for 6 months in the Antibody Validation team where we performed SDS-PAGE and subsequent Western Blotting to detect the specificity of the antibodies
Research Interest/Area
Oncology, Tumoroids and Lung Cancer resistance mechanism
Research
Lung Cancer is broadly classified into Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) and Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC). The currently used 2D culturing (Monolayer) method is now known to have several drawback relating to cellular functions in the sense that the cells do not closely mimic the in vivo conditions. Due to this major disadvantage, 3D culturing has now started to replace the 2D culture.
3D cultures refer to generation of organoids (an organ generated from healthy adult cells)/tumoroids (cancerous cells or tumor sample used to generate an organ in vitro) from either the established cancerous cell lines or directly from the patient derived samples. The major advantage here is that the cells resemble their in vivo conditions to a much closer extent. A major requirement of the tumoroid is to recapitulate the characteristics of the parental tumor cells in terms of genetic makeup and cellular morphology which will be the aim here, followed by characterization of the formed tumoroid.
According to the digits given by Yokota et al.,2021 ATCC (American Type Culture Collection) has 28 colon cancer tumoroids have been lodged whereas this number falls to 2 when we talk about lung cancer tumoroids. If we further look into genetically analyzed tumoroids by Human Cancer Models Initiative (HCMI), colon cancer has about 37 tumoroids whereas lung cancer has none so far till 2020. Several papers have been published which outline the development of a tumoroid using patient derived samples (tumors). If the same can be extrapolated to cell lines, remains to be experimented.
In conclusion, it can be said that there is a dire need to address the lack of data regarding NSCLC tumoroids due to which a barrier is formed between the disease and its treatment. This void is hoped to be filled by the use of 3D cultures.