Mentors: Griselda Metta Yvone, Josh Gould and Channing Yu
One goal of current cancer research is to determine which chemical compounds target which cancer cell types.The current approach to find new treatments is to grow cancer cells, treat them with one or two drugs at a time, and assay cell viability using a traditional method like measuring the amount of ATP present.
David and his mentors tested a new method they call PRISM, which can be used on 80 cell types at once.David tested the sensitivity of 14 different cell types to 6 drugs, using both the traditional method and the new PRISM method.David catalogued which cell types displayed sensitivity to which drugs in his two parallel experiments, and found that the PRISM method was 84% accurate when directly compared to the traditional method, and much more efficient.David’s work shows that PRISM is a new, accurate, high throughput method that can be used to further our understanding of how particular drugs target different cancer cell types.