Insight Out
Insight Out is a podcast brought to you by Pavel and Carolina as a side activity during their PhD studies. We are curious minds and science enthusiastics. Insight Out focuses on daily lives of academicians and entrepreneurs. We like to talk about all types of experiences in science, scientific commmunities and especially love personal stories of our guests. This is the place where science get unfiltered with honest, truthful and engaging discussions with our guests!
Insight Out
Meet Oline: Exploring Personalized Medicine and CRISPR
Lets meet Oline! This episode was created for the purpose of the Haapaniemi lab website (https://haapaniemilab.org/). Kick back, relax, and let the waves of wisdom wash over you in this podcast episode – where learning meets laughter, and knowledge is served with a side of chill vibes.
When she's not revolutionizing the biotech field, our guest unwinds by intertwining yarns both metaphorically and literally. She maintains a delightful balance between the precision of her PhD project and the creativity of her knitting, which she shares with the world through her Instagram profile. Hear about her pursuit of automating the design of gene-editing guides and her exploration into cell-free methods that could accelerate the journey from lab to clinic. Plus, she gives us a peek into her life outside the lab, from engaging with fellow trivia aficionados at pub quizzes to embracing the tranquility of nature walks. Join us for an episode that stitches together the fabric of advanced science with the warmth of personal hobbies, proving that innovation and inspiration often go hand-in-hand.
All music clips were used from the song "Jukka Tukka" after agreement with amazing band and friends 2+1 Jam band.
This podcast episode was created under the technical and official support of University of Oslo, Norway.
I Bachelor's degree from Bergen, on the west coast of Norway, and I moved also to start the PhD about one and a half years ago.
Oline:I'm 26 years old. I took my master's thesis at UiB, where I worked on brain cancer but also CRISPR. So I was working on making a knockout model of glioblastoma cells to try and make them more sensitive to chemotherapy. So I was mainly working with cells and trying to make knockout models with CRISPR, using lentivirus and then exposing the cells to chemotherapy to see and doing different tests to see if we were able to sensitize the cells. Yeah, when I was looking for a PhD project that looked interesting, I was very interested in to keep going with CRISPR. So that was a key word for me and also I was interested in learning more about molecular biology and becoming more experienced with the molecular biology and I also think that the immunology part is interesting because I haven't got that much experience with immunology from earlier. So, yeah, but mainly the CRISPR part.
Oline:Yeah, my project is focused on taking the established protocols and trying to make it more high throughput. So right now in the lab we have some model mutations and model diseases that we have optimized the protocol the CRISPR protocol to work with. But we know that there are a lot more different mutations and different genes that affect the immune system. So I want to try and see if I can make or establish a pipeline to screen new mutations, to personalize the CRISPR therapy. It's good.
Oline:I have definitely learned a lot about the CRISPR and the immune diseases that we work with and I've collaborated with bioinformatician to make everything more automatic in the design process of designing the guides and designing the reagents that you need to edit the cells with CRISPR. And I'm trying testing out some new types of protocol. For example, right now I'm working on to see if we can screen the cells using cell-free methods, so isolate the DNA first and then screen the guides directly in the DNA, so you avoid the whole cell lab stage of the screening process, which is the most time-consuming part. I think it's challenging to try to invent a whole new thing that's supposed to be efficient and cheap, which may not be that possible, but I'm trying my best and I have some good guidance and I'm also thinking about what other experiments I could do to try to optimize the pipeline and getting towards the clinic.
Oline:In my free time, I really enjoy knitting. I'm a little bit obsessed with it these days. I knit a lot. I buy a lot of yarn. I look at knitting books. I have a knitting Instagram profile you can follow, and I also enjoy going to pub quizzes with friends and going for walks as well in the nature. That's mainly knitting and watching TV.