At 9 am on Monday, July 14, 2003, when most college students are off to work or summer classes, I was preparing to step onto a stage to give a presentation to about 500 cancer researchers in Washington, D.C. I was in the city attending the 94th Annual Conference of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) on July 10-14, to give a presentation at a mini-symposium on my research in pancreatic cancer. I sent in an abstract in November on, “Targeting PRL-1, a Protein Tyrosine Phosphatase, for the Treatment of Pancreatic Cancer”. PRL-1 is an upregulated gene in pancreatic cancer that was identified using cDNA micro array. Over the past year, I have been doing work with antisense oligonucleotides and siRNA to inhibit PRL-1 in pancreatic cell lines to observe the effects on the cells. I have also been doing a random drug screen of small molecules to find an inhibitor or PRL-1. We have tested over 15,000 compounds already and will test 5,000 to 10,000 more. Lucky for me, I have been getting good enough results that the AACR decided I should give a presentation on it.

This was my first conference and the whole experience was rather stressful since the conference was initially scheduled to be in Toronto, Canada in April, but was canceled two days before it was supposed to begin due to a SARS outbreak. After the initial disappointment of that blow, I was happy to find that they were rescheduling the conference in the summer. When it came time to go to D.C., I was excited since I had never been to the city before and I was planning on escaping the conference so I could go sightseeing. We arrived to humid 85 degree heat and thunderstorms, but it was spectacular to drive into the city and see the Washington Monument, the Mall, and all the official buildings. The conference was very interesting; I met lots of people doing great research, even people studying zebra fish to find a drug to help a heart condition, and more about techniques like RNAi.

Yet, at the back of my mind the entire time I was thinking about having to speak in front of so many people and answer questions from those with such varied backgrounds. So when Monday came, I found that I was much less nervous than I had thought I would be. My talk went well, I didn’t flub too many things, but when I finished, there were already eight people lined up to ask questions. Some of the questions were a bit tough and one man even got angry with me for not being able to provide a certain piece of information, but I think it all went well in the end and I was just extremely glad to have it over with. I then had to stand next to posters from my lab for the next six hours, and rush to the airport to catch our flight back to Tucson. Overall, it was a fun experience and I am glad to have lived through it and come out with just a few bruises.

Amanda Farnsworth, UBRPer in Dr. David Bearss’s lab, Molecular and Cellular Biology