This summer, I was an Amgen Scholar at the National Institutes of Health. I was working at the National Cancer Institute in Dr. Suresh Ambudkar’s lab. The focus of the lab is on p-glycoprotein, which is a membrane protein on all cells capable of pumping out many different substrates from inside the cell. In cancer cells, this protein is over-expressed, meaning there are a lot more on the cell. This causes problems for cancer patients because this protein often will pump out anti-cancer drugs from the cell, making the cells resistant to treatment. My project with p-glycoprotein involved identifying more molecules that are able to be pumped out by the protein, as there are very many known, but new ones are being found frequently.
