ROS1, Salvage Therapy, Cytospin: This Week's Lessons in Translation

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​Part of being a medical science translator is researching new medical concepts, treatments, diseases, techniques, etc. in order to accurately translate documents for clients. Below are a few things I learned while working the week of October 23-29.

​What have you learned about recently?

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• I learned about ROS1 and ALK1 inhibitors, namely how successful they have been in treating lung cancer.
• Salvage therapy finally made sense to me. Previously, I have translated it with no concept of what it meant. In other words, it was just a term, two words, that I often saw when translating about cancer treatment. Now, I understand that it is a line of treatment administered after a patient does not respond well to or presents progression on another drug/treatment line, and it calls for use of a different drug or drug class. As a hypothetical example, chemotherapy might be used first in a cancer patient, but metastases are found afterwards This is proof that he/she has progressed on the chemo, so he/she would be given a ROS1 inhibitor as salvage therapy.
• I learned that cytospin, or cytocentrifugation, is a technique used in cytopathology (and other scientific fields, I’m sure) that concentrates cells onto a slide in order to study them.
• Cell block is another technique in cytopathology used to study specimens. It involves concentrating the specimen into paraffin blocks.