Week 4: Narrowing Concentration
Hello everyone! Thank you for coming to read about my progress for week 4!
This week I spent time reflecting on whether I’m going to follow what was highlighted by the resource I mentioned in my week 3 post and concentrate on Immune checkpoint inhibitors and creating a uniform procedure for diagnosing cardiac complications. Before I finalize my decision with my advisors I decided to continue looking into different chemotherapy drugs and more research papers on immune checkpoint inhibitors to see which would be the best candidate to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis. Since it isn’t possible to create a uniform procedure with a singular metanalysis, I also devoted my attention to thinking about how I could refine the question so that it could be answered with data. While making these deliberations I was trying to find options where I could collect sufficient data and provide new insight.
Along with immune checkpoint inhibitors some other drugs that could be possible candidates are eribulin and ixabepilone, which are both typically used to treat breast cancer. Eribulin binds to the ends of microtubules to prevent their elongation. This eventually leads to mitotic arrest and the apoptosis of cells since the microtubules are unable to align the chromosomes and attach to their kinetochores. Ixabepilone also prevents the elongation of microtubules but it binds to beta-tubulin (protein build blocks that make up microtubules) instead of the end of microtubules.
Some of the ways I could refine my question for a metanalysis is by concentrating on evaluating the typical characteristics of the toxicity and how efficient certain diagnostic techniques are at identifying biomarkers for heart complications. If I wanted to diverge from the idea of contributing to creating a general procedure for diagnosing myocarditis I could conduct a metanalysis on what drug combinations increase the risk of toxicity.
Thank you for checking in on my updates for week 4! See you next time!