Name: Katharina SCHÖNBERGER
            Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg

Visiting Period: June 7th (Tue) - 28th (Tue), 2022

Country: Germany

I was thrilled when I could finally visit the IRCMS in June 2022, since my internship had to be postponed for more than 2 years due to the Covid-19 pandemic. During my 3-week internship, I was supervised by Prof. PhD. Hitoshi Takizawa and MD, PhD Tatsuya Morishima.

The aim of my project was to gain mechanistic insights into the effects of distinct therapeutic drug combinations on leukemia cell lines. Using CyTOF, I looked at the activity of different metabolic regulators and signaling pathways to evaluate the drug responses at different time points after in vitro treatment. I learned how to plan, conduct and analyze this state-of-the-art technique. Furthermore, I greatly benefitted from the fruitful discussions during the lab meetings at which I shared some of the work that I had conducted during my PhD. Moreover, I could also share my knowledge with several lab members and support some of the ongoing experiments.

Importantly, the research experience at the IRCMS did not only offer me the great opportunity to learn new techniques, but also, to get to know great scientists from all over the world. Since this was my first time in Japan (and even in Asia), I learned so many new things about Japanese culture, language and climate! And although I also had to face some little"challenges"(e.g. how to travel with Japanese public transport without knowing Japanese), they could be easily solved with Japanese kindness!

Overall, the IRCMS internship enabled me to grow as a scientist and as a person.
I will definitely come back to Japan!