Claire Song
I am a rising sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania. I have an interest in biomedical research that focuses on environmentally triggered diseases such as asthma, obesity, and cancer. This summer I am working in Dr. Jeffrey Field’s lab in the Pharmacology department at the Perelman School of Medicine. I will be researching and modeling cellular migration pathways, with specific focus on macrophage motility in response to inflammation. Chemoattractance of macrophages to immune mediated cytokines is one of the main steps leading to an inflammatory response in the body, and my project consists of modeling this pathway. I am testing the ability of various antibodies to block migratory action of a monocytic cell line transfected to chemoattract to different cytokines and cytokine-like hormones in the immune system that are involved in inducing inflammation. Ultimately, I hope to see how diseases caused and exacerbated by inflammation mediated by cellular migration pathways can be remedied on the biochemical level by specific targeting by antibodies.
