Week 3: Molecular Pathology and Fancy Equipment

You ever wonder how geneticists get their super detailed information about mutations for each individual patient? Well, this is where molecular pathology comes into play. When people generally think of pathology, they picture tissue stains and tumor observations. But on the molecular scale, visual cues become a lot trickier as you cannot exactly see a genetic mutation under a microscope. Even cytogenetic screening that I mentioned last week cannot pick up the minute base pair changes seen in cases of leukemia or genetic disorders of all kinds. A collaborative mindset that combines molecular biology, bioinformatics, genetics, tissue anatomy, etc. all encompass what a molecular pathologist does.

How does this relate to a biomedical engineer like myself? Beyond simple data analysis skills, the emphasis on cross-discipline knowledge is something easily relatable to me and the techniques used by molecular pathologists in a clinical sense are also being used in basic science research such as my own. This provided an interesting perspective on how robust some of the biological techniques in the lab are and how differently they are used in the clinical setting versus the scientific setting. Funny enough, molecular pathologists use an extensive amount of PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) as the mutations they are looking for need to be seen in a clear way. Therefore, the best way to do that is to amplify the amount of DNA present within their clinical samples. My project back in Ithaca uses the same logic applied in cell culture to elucidate some of the genetic changes in cells exposed to stimulus. It’s fascinating to see how precision medicine like this is directly applied.

Another thing to note about this week is that clinical pathologists must use very fancy equipment with robotic arms and enclosed cages that look quite expensive. The amount of work that must go into designing the workflow around these machines is quite daunting and I respect the people who do this kind of work. Also, its fun watching a robotic arm perform a very meticulous task with ease and improve the process. That is engineering at it’s finest.