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Each day, as Marquis Scholar Julie M. Xanthopoulos ’04 (Lewistown, Pa.) feeds 48 male mice, cleans their cages, and administers injections to each, she tries to remember that those seemingly mundane tasks could eventually help countless women — and men — recover from breast cancer.
“It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day routine,” says Xanthopoulos, a biology major. But she points out that her independent research project could help researchers better understand the drug anastrozole, which inhibits aromatase, an enzyme essential to estrogen synthesis in post-menopausal women. “It’s hard work, but hopefully I’ll get good results.”
Xanthopoulos, who is conducting the research under the guidance of Shyamal Majumdar, Kreider Professor of Biology, began several different in vitro experiments involving anastrozole during the fall semester.
“I used culture flasks in which cancer cells were growing,” Xanthopoulos says, explaining that she treated some with anastrozole and others with a control solution.
She would count the number of cells in each flask daily, placing samples on special slides with gridlines so she could tell how many cells the entire flask contained. She conducted the counting activity five days a week and repeated the study four times.
Xanthopoulos conducted several other experiments with the drug, using a scanning electron microscope to photograph cells treated with anastrozole and untreated cells.
“We noticed a lot more surface damage on the treated breast cancer cells, which means the drug was having a negative effect on them,” she says.
Xanthopoulos combined the results of her work with similar research conducted last year by Farah Laiwalla ’03 and presented them at the 79th Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania Academy of Science April 4-6 in Grantville, Pa.
“It was a great experience,” Xanthopoulos says. “I enjoyed the challenge of answering questions. I also got a lot of positive feedback from professors and other student researchers.”
When Xanthopoulos returned to Lafayette, she began the in vivo portion of her research, which involved injecting the 48 male mice with 4T1 murine mammary carcinoma-breast cancer cells, then beginning a 30-day sequence of injecting 12 mice with anastrozole, 12 with tamoxifen, an anti-cancer drug that has more severe side effects than anastrozole, 12 with a combination of the two drugs, and 12 with a control solution.
Majumdar, who hired Xanthopoulos last summer to help edit two PAS books, says her work has been consistently outstanding.
“She’s an excellent student,” he says. “She’s very dependable, she writes well, she speaks well, and she presented so well at PAS. I think she will flourish.”
Xanthopoulos, who plans to continue the research next year for her senior honors thesis, will spend 10 weeks this summer participating in Thomas Jefferson University’s summer undergraduate research program.
President of Alpha Phi sorority, Xanthopoulos is a participant in Lafayette’s health professions program. She has served as a teaching assistant for the Biology 101 laboratory the past two semesters and has been chosen to serve as a teaching assistant for Majumdar’s Biological Electron Microscopy course in the fall.