This week (April 15-21) is National Volunteer Week. Across Canada, 12.7 million people donate their time to make Canada a better place to live. In the stem cell community, scientists, clinicians, researchers and hundreds of university students across the country work hard to make StemCellTalks a success every year. In the spirit of National Volunteer Week, thank you for your efforts to educate, inspire and engage high school students in stem cell science.
CCRM has been sponsoring StemCellTalks for many years now and Signals has regularly reported on it. Because we attend the Toronto event, we blog about the Toronto event. This year, I thought it would be nice to focus on another chapter. Thanks to McMaster University for permission to post Damian Tran’s (slightly edited and shortened) blog.
Damian Tran is a graduate researcher in the MSc program at McMaster University, currently working at the Hope Cancer Lab at the McMaster Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute (SCC-RI). His research focuses on the development of artificial intelligence software that can find weaknesses in acute myeloid leukemia (AML; a cancer of the blood), and autonomously repurpose pharmaceuticals used in other diseases to better combat it.
I had the distinct pleasure of partnering with Let’s Talk Science to host the 6th annual StemCellTalks Hamilton symposium at McMaster University, which occurred on March 23rd, 2018. Together, SCC-RI and Let’s Talk Science made this chapter of the Canada-wide symposium series a major success!
StemCellTalks is held in eight cities across the nation, all with the end goal of inspiring the future generation of young scientists at the senior high school level. Thus far, it has given over 5,000 Canadian high school students the opportunity to delve into concepts of introductory stem cell biology, and challenge their minds to think above and beyond.
This year, StemCellTalks Hamilton hosted over one hundred students in grades 11 and 12 from five high schools in Hamilton and the Greater Toronto Area. Seats at the symposium were highly coveted due to our exciting theme this year: Toward curing the incurable: stem cell gene therapies and the medicine of the future.
The students were given opportunities to hear about ground-breaking science from our panel of talented, highly influential researchers from the Hamilton and Toronto areas. Our very own Dr. Kristin Hope opened with a fantastic prelude about stem cell biology, incorporating incredible examples of stem cell regeneration capacities in nature and the clinic. Dr. Ronan Foley, a hematologist at Juravinski Hospital, director of the Clinical Stem Cell Laboratory, and associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine at McMaster University, gave an inspirational speech about the work his team conducted as part of the first ever successful gene therapy trial for Fabry disease worldwide. Last, but certainly not least, Dr. Jim Hu, senior scientist at the Translational Medicine Program at SickKids Hospital in Toronto, gave a fascinating talk about the use of viruses to, one day, deliver gene therapies to the lungs of patients affected by cystic fibrosis.
Understandably, these stem cell concepts were difficult to grasp for our student attendees and yet, in the face of this challenge, they were attentive, focused and highly inquisitive, asking many questions of our volunteers and speakers who helped fill gaps in their knowledge and bridge the distance between scientist and student. Our volunteers from the SCC-RI, the McMaster Stem Cell Club, and Let’s Talk Science slowed down the pace with engaging discussions about stem cell biology and case studies regarding the controversies in medical ethics of the coming gene therapy renaissance.
As a fun experience to end the day of learning, we provided a hands-on activity called Giant Gene Editing, which took DNA editing to the macroscale! Students worked with cut-out pieces of a simplified CRISPR-Cas9 knock-in system to make gene insertions for fake patients, and to learn about the possible results!
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Here are locations and dates of upcoming StemCellTalks in 2018:
Happy learning and volunteering!
Learn more about Fabry disease in this video.
Stacey Johnson
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