Stephanie
Stephanie
Natick High School
Natick, MA
Mentor:
Anthony Fazio
PRISM Lab
Stephanie spent her summer learning that major advances in cancer research depend not only on discovering new drugs, but also on making the technologies used to test those drugs more accurate, reproducible, and efficient. She joined the PRISM Lab, where researchers perform large-scale drug screens across cancer cell lines to identify potential therapeutic vulnerabilities.
PRISM experiments depend on carefully prepared source plates containing compounds at defined concentrations. Historically, plate generation has relied on both the Hamilton STAR liquid-handling robot and the Tecan D300e drug printer. Stephanie and Shayenne investigated whether source-plate generation could be consolidated onto the Hamilton STAR, which offers automated compound tracking, barcode scanning, and error logging.
Stephanie gained exposure to high-throughput oncology screening and automated liquid handling while learning how changes early in an experimental workflow can affect downstream biological results. The team generated source plates using manual pipetting, the Tecan D300e, and the Hamilton STAR. These plates were transferred into assay-ready plates with an Echo acoustic liquid handler, cancer cells were added and incubated, and CellTiter-Glo was used to measure cell viability. The resulting luminescence data were analyzed as drug dose-response curves.
The comparison revealed variability among the three source-plate generation methods. Rather than forcing a premature conclusion, Stephanie's results showed that the new Hamilton workflow requires additional optimization before it can be adopted for production-scale screening.
Stephanie learned that automation is only an improvement when it can be validated against dependable biological readouts, and that identifying variability is an important result when developing a new workflow.
Her project highlights an essential part of science: optimization and validation are discoveries too. By identifying where a promising automated workflow still needs improvement, Stephanie helped move PRISM toward a more reliable and scalable system for cancer drug screening.
Stephanie said the experience gave her confidence to further “explore a future career in STEM” and introduced her to a completely new side of science through hands-on wet-lab work. She also credited her mentor Tony, her partner Shayenne, the BSSP mentors, and her cohort with making the summer meaningful - a reminder that even highly automated science depends on collaboration.
