Alan - First Week at UCSF

Hi Everyone!

After arriving in San Francisco last Sunday, I spent this past week settling into the downtown Berkeley apartment that I’ll be sharing with Rohit for the next couple of months, as well as learning my way around the Roy lab at UCSF.

First day at the lab was really exciting. Here are a couple pictures of the Mission Bay campus, which was completed just a few years ago. Everything is super new and modern, and there’s still construction for other buildings going on around the campus. Most of the people who work at the Mission Bay campus are either professional researchers or doctors/nurses for the nearby hospital. The graduate students take most of their classes at the original Parnassus campus (where Maya is).

I work in Byers Hall, which is connected to Genentech Hall and a short walk down the block from the shuttle stop. There are three other volunteers working for the Roy lab this summer – Kimmai, David, and Pujita, who are all undergrad college students. For the first couple of days Shuvo (my PI) was out traveling so I didn’t get to meet him until later in the week. I’ve been reporting to Charlie so far, who’s my supervisor.

The Roy lab is focused on developing artificial organ devices that can be implanted into patients’ bodies. Charlie explained that most of the UCSF labs conduct applied research instead of pure or basic research, which is research that can eventually be used in treatments. One of the main projects that my lab has been working on for several years is the Silicon Kidney Project, which aims to create an artificial mechanical kidney to replace failed kidneys for patients that don’t have access to organ donors. This project is in the pre-clinical phase, which means that it’s being tested on animals before human clinical trials are approved.

Another focus of the Roy lab is the intravascular bioartificial pancreas device, or iBAP, which is an artificial pancreas that aims to treat type 1 (juvenile) diabetes. Most of the approaches to treating T1D include injecting donor pancreas cells (islets) into patients, but the immune system tends to quickly reject the transplant. The bioartificial pancreas device tries to reduce immune rejection by preventing immune cells in the blood from being able to access the transplanted pancreas cells. It does this by inserting a physical barrier between the immune cells and the transplant cells, which is the silicon nanopore membrane (SNM).

Here’s a picture of one of the iBAPs. The version depicted is one of the earlier models. The lab is currently trying to make the device smaller and more ergonomic so that it fits inside of the animal’s (and eventually patients’) body better.

And here are some pictures of an iBAP device after it was used in a live pig study. The device clotted earlier than expected, so it was disassembled for further examination. (warning: blood)

During the next few days, I started working on my independent project, which is going to involve hollow fiber cell scaffolds. Hollow fibers are often used in dialyzers, which are basically just really specific fluid filters. The main problem with filtering blood out through dialyzers and using that to prevent immune rejection is clotting. Blood likes to clot, so much so that it prevents hollow fibers from being a feasible solution to the pancreas immune rejection problem. But hollow fibers are mass-produced and easily obtainable, so it’s still worth trying to implement them.

My project involves taking blood that has already been filtered by the silicon nanopore membrane (aka “ultrafiltrate”), and passing that through the hollow fibers, where the islet cells will be surrounding the fibers. This means that the blood clotting proteins won’t be able to reach the hollow fibers, but the dissolved oxygen and glucose will pass through both the silicon membrane and the hollow fiber to reach the islets, producing insulin. More to come next week!