Well as my last post stated, I was sent to China in April as part of a team for the Kenetics foundation in Parkinson's disease.
I work in a primate facility that is funded by the NIH and several outside sources such as the Michael J. Fox foundation and the Kenetics foundation. Our facility has "sistered" a facility in Nanning, China to help us provide quality research in search of a cure in the long run and the understanding of all aspects of this disease in the short term.
Why in China you say when the United States should be able to take the credit?? Because these countries are going to do it anyways, they have looser regulations, cheaper labor and resources and can produce data faster than we can without all of the red tape. The problem though is that the scientific community have been burned by outsourced data in the past and it has given some of these countries bad names. So we collaborated with this facility that had to pass many strict guidelines and had to be IACUC approved according to our standards (united states) in order to be able to compare their data with ours.
The facility I work in has been named the Parkinson's Research Center of America and the director is one of our PI's. I know that some of this lingo maybe difficult to understand but bear with me.....
The first crew that went over, helped set up the guidelines and expectations that the people and designers had to go through in order to pass our IACUC (International Animal Care and Use Committee) inspection. Once this was done then we could start planning the staffing and equipment needed for the research.
I was included in the second medical team that went over and I had to set up all of the surgical equipment and anesthesia equipment. We had hope to perform the first 24 intitial surgeries for the Parkinson's project , which meant that I had to teach a veterinary team from the ground up in everything including but not limited to sedation drugs, sample collection, IV catheter placement, intubation for inhalant anesthesia, train them on anesthesia machines and monitoring and also recovering the animals after surgery.
The first day we did 12 surgeries which to just use as an example, the most of these procedures I have done in a single day were 5. There were two surgeons, one from UCSF and the other from Bethesda who were Neurosurgeons, which gave us the capacity to do 2 surgeries at a time. I was video taped and a translator relayed everything to the vet team as I was performing the tasks that they would need to learn. After ten hours in surgery we finished the 12 we were hoping for without any complications.
Day 2 we decided to perform only 6 surgeries so that I could get the staff to get their feet wet and start performing the tasks they watched the day before. It took longer but I will say that I have never worked with such an enthusiastic group before in my life. Mind you I have taught at a veterinary school and a technical college and never have I had such attentive, eager students. The hardest feat for them to learn was the intubation and the CSF collection but we got over that hurdle.
I am proud to say by day three I only supervised in the prep area and surgery and they did all of the work with me only interceding when needed.
We did all 24 surgeries and everyone was amazed and I was dog tired (as were everyone else) the last several days I was there the other research techs from my facility and UCSF taught the staff post op monitoring and care. I was quarantined to my room because I had spiked a fever...but that is another post.....
To be continued when i get a breather!!
BTW this picture is the walkway up to the facility
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accomplished
cranky
touched
