Sascha Dietrich

Home Institution
Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena

Host Institution
Hematology / Oncology Department
University of Chicago, Illinois

E-Mail:
 sascha.dietrich@uni-jena.de

Research Topic
see Abstract
Personal Reactions to the U.S. Experience
I experienced my stay in the U.S. as very helpful tin discovering interesting new directions to go in my future, and I really enjoyed all the things I could learn here! Before, I was really interested to see how research in the US works out and how a combination of clinical work and research is possible without leaving anything behind. It was great for me to see that you don't have to give up clinical work in order to do research. That means that the physicians have a defined time frame, and they are spending approximately two months in the hospital followed by two months of lab work.
While taking part in rounds and clinical conferences I had the opportunity to meet interesting and successful people from either research or the clinic, and my mentor was so kind to introduce me to some of them. It is important to know a lot of people, so that maybe some of them can be very helpful when you are planning to come back to the U.S. later.
Living in such a big city as Chicago was a great experience for me as well. Unfortunately the University of Chicago is located in the South of Chicago in Hyde Park. This means a ride of about 45 minutes by bus one way everyday, because I had chosen to live downtown. However, the University of Chicago campus is gorgeous, an old style campus with beautiful buildings and a little park in the middle. But when you live downtown you have a lot more chances to go outside, and, especially, you are more safe in the evenings.
Greatest Difficulties Encountered
I think everybody will tell you about the problems with finishing the visa paperwork with the university. It was the same for me, too. It took me several weeks until I received all the paperwork I needed for the embassy. Another problem was to get used to the public transportation system, especially during the winter months, when it was sometimes not easy to catch a bus in time.
Most humorous incident
When you are used to the German or European style of sweet popcorn, be careful when you go to an American movie theatre. I bought myself a big bag of fresh popcorn and was unpleasantly surprised that it tasted salted. I was propitiated as I saw people in front of a topping machine, so I thought that they were spreading some liquid caramel sauce over it. I tried this, too, and I took a really big portion of this stuff. After I tasted the first piece of popcorn I recognised that my popcorn was full of liquid warm BUTTER, so I never tried popcorn there again.

Helpful Hints for Future Students

  • Try to live downtown. It makes life a lot more fun!
  • Contact former BMEP students to get the latest news about visa procedures, housing and so on
  • Chicago Symphony Orchestra offers student tickets for $ 10. Try it! www.cso.org
  • All in all public transportation is okay, so you need not think about buying a car. The parking rates in the city are incredibly high (e.g. $300/month in a public garage or $10-20/ hour).
  • A credit card is essential, but be careful when buying something on the internet (especially booking a flight there) because international credit cards are mostly not accepted.

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Abstract on Research Topic
Role of the c-Met Receptor in Lung Cancer-Potential new Strategies for Target Therapies

Authors:
Sascha Dietrich, Patrick Ma, Ravi Salgia

Institution:
University of Chicago, Hematology/Oncology Department

Project:
Future directions for lung cancer treatment are heavily weighted toward target therapies against molecular abnormalities involved in pathogenesis in lung cancer. Small-molecule drugs like Gleevec, Iressa and Tarceva are successfully already in clinical use and do not have these terrible side effects of common chemotherapy agents. The goal of my work is to contribute evaluating the role of the c-met receptor in lung cancer for the potential development of inhibitor molecules. C-met is one of the receptor tyrosine kinases that it has been shown to be overexpressed and/or mutated in a variety of malignancies. Most missense mutations of c-met receptor have been found to be located in the tyrosine kinase domain, the first time identified in hereditary and sporadic papillary renal cancer. These mutations cause constitutive activation of the c-met tyrosine kinase. New mutations of c-met could be identified in lung cancer, which are interestingly not in tyrosine kinase domain, they were found to be in the in extracellular sema domain and in juxtamembrane domain.

I have created these recently identified sema domain mutations into a plasmid construct to evaluate their role in tumorigenesis, invasion and metastasis in lung cancer. Therefore I have transfected the mutant harboring constructs into Normal Human Bronchial Epithelial (NHBE) cells, which have been immobilized to overcome the replicative senescence and culture crisis. This is an ideal model to study if these normal cells can be turned into malignant cells by expressing the mutated c-met protein. Furthermore, I have utilized the c-met mutant transfected NHBE cells to perform invasions and scattering assays or time-lapse video microscopy for studying the cell motility.