Tina Kolenc Milavec, a PhD student from the Department of Genetic Toxicology and Cancer Biology at the National Institute of Biology (NIB), spent last two months at University Medical Center in Amsterdam, in the group of Febe van Maldegem. During her first expert visit last year she learnt all about the Imaging Mass Cytometry (IMC), a relatively new method, which has a lot of potential in the field of cancer research. With this knowledge, she returned to Amsterdam this year to use IMC and try to unveil the secrets of spatial characteristics within glioblastoma microenvironment as well as changes that occur upon standard glioblastoma treatment. If she had to describe her experience in one sentence, it would be: “laboratory work part is easy and fun, but the amount of data that you obtain is enormous, and data analysis demands a lot of programming, critical thinking, and especially patience”. With a lot of determination, learning and time, spent analysing the data, she was able to draw some very interesting conclusions.
Tina would like to thank Febe van Maldegem for having Tina in her group and patiently answering a myriad of questions regarding data analysis, as well as all other members of the group for the help in the lab and fun times out of work.