Hello, My name is Elyse Schechter. I go to Apex High School (roll cougs) where I am a part of the Academy of Information Technology (AOIT) program. In this program, I learned very important soft skills such as interviewing, communicating, and presenting along with hard skills such as computer coding. In this program, I have become a much more confident public speaker and also became Microsoft Word and PowerPoint 2016 certified. I have been exposed to 4 different coding languages (visual basic, C#, SAS, and java) and given the opportunity to participate in an internship at a place of my choice. I interned at the Duke Cancer Institute, which is why this blog was started. Part of my assignments for this internship was to write updates for every 5-10 hours of work and write about what I enjoyed about the workplace.
2020 has been a challenging year. The COVID-19 pandemic has made many things unable to happen, or be executed in new and strange ways. Fortunately for me, Dr. Jason Somarelli found a way to provide me and five other students with a way to learn about cancer. We were instructed to choose a web application in order to either learn about cancer vulnerabilities or to answer a biological question. I decided that I wanted to identify compounds to treat Double Hit Lymphoma (DHL) using the DepMap portal. My grandfather was diagnosed with Double Hit Lymphoma when I was in 7th grade, while he survived, he still suffers from the side effects of experimental treatment plans. DHL is caused by mutations in the MYC and or BCL2/BCL6. It is usually associated with late-stage cancer progression and poor prognosis. But because DHL is a rare subgroup of Lymphoma, there is not yet a standard way for diagnosing and treating it. In my research, I learned about the MYC gene and how it is indi...