Internship Week 3

I'm interning virtually at the Paegel lab, a pharmaceutical chemistry lab at UC Irvine with Dr. Brian Paegel, professor of Pharmaceutical chemistry at UC Irvine. On the lab's official website, the overall goal is stated: "The Paegel lab studies and applies the principles of miniaturization, which have driven revolutions in semiconductor microfabrication and genome sequencing, to both chemical synthesis and analysis. We seek to expand the pipeline of new medicines by democratizing drug discovery and investigating novel therapeutic targets that do not conform to the canonical constraints of druggability." 

That is a lot of large, complicated words grouped together. Let me break it down. Essentially, the way drugs are developed today through most massive pharmaceutical companies are through massive, incredibly expensive machines that run millions of different possible drugs at a time on a specific enzyme or protein (like the COVID-19 spike protein) to see what happens. Dr. Paegel's lab is trying to completely miniaturize that entire process, with very little drawbacks from the effects of downsizing the process. It deals with a lot of STEM topics, from electrical engineering to chemistry to applied mathematics.  

This image is a detailed process of the miniaturized machine that the Paegel lab has built. It's a simple drug discovery process: thousands of different compounds are tested against a protein or enzyme, and they are organized if a reaction occurred or not. Each compound is inside a bead, which is encoded using DELs : DNA-encoded library beads, so you can read what compound had a reaction or not.

My project is more on the applied mathematics side: I'm trying to figure out how many beads (which house the compounds) are needed to get a certain success rate of unique beads : that is in a group of 10 beads, no two beads are the same. I'm using a specific model called 'the Monte Carlo method,' named after the place in Monaco, Spain known for it's gambling. Essentially, it's a randomly evolving simulation that can be used to simulate anything from flipping a coin, to the stock market. I'm closer to the flipping coin side of things though. 

My internship has made my vision for the future even more opaque, but that's ok. This experience has opened me to many, many more possibilities for the future, and that's exciting.