The Call for Abstracts at ASCP 2024 Has Been Extended. Don’t Miss Out on this Opportunity!

The Call for Abstracts for the ASCP 2024 Annual Meeting, Sept. 3-4 in Chicago, has been extended to April 30. Submit your abstract here.

There can be no underestimating the beneficial impact of having an abstract chosen for display at an ASCP Annual Meeting. Presenting research at conferences is crucial for building awareness of one's work within the scientific community.

Lauren Miller, MD, MJ, MLS(ASCP)^CM, was honored and humbled to win the Best Resident/Fellow Poster Award last year. “I was completely surprised to be even under consideration in this category,” she says. “I was very honored to be selected among an elite group of posters and projects.”

She described the opportunity to attend the ASCP 2023 Annual Meeting as “awesome. I am a medical laboratory scientist and I got to collaborate with med-tech colleagues and with other pathology trainees. I received a lot of questions about my research and often that helps spark ideas for future directions of my research or for other projects.”

Her research, which will eventually be published, was on a case report of a 10-year-old boy diagnosed who was with pancreatic acinar cell carcinoma, a very rare malignant care that occurs in about 15 percent of all pediatric pancreatic cancers, which are also rare. She came across the case report last year during her cytogenetics rotation during the second year as a trainee at the University of Michigan Medical School.

“The thing that interested me is that it took them a year to diagnose because they could not find a mass in his pancreas; it was found in his lymph nodes where it had metastasized,” Dr. Miller says. “They had to go hunting for the main lesion. The reason it came across our cytogenetics laboratory is that we perform microarray karyotype analysis. Those are two separate tests; the karyotype examines the chromosome structure in your cell. When we are able to freeze cells in their chromosome phase, we can see the structure and sometimes we can see different breaks or the physical morphology of it. Microarray is a sequencing technique that can find smaller genetic abnormalities.”

For this case, it was a novel mutation.  Dr. Miller says that, according to the literature she has read, this is the first time that this fusion partner has been identified.  

This discovery is important because this malignancy is so rare, and all pancreatic cancers can be difficult to treat. Hence, understanding the different mutations that can be present helps the team identify the best treatment plans, according to Dr. Miller.

Looking back, she said the research experience gave her an opportunity to see if the areas of cytogenetics or molecular pathology were a good fit for her. She ended up selecting a different fellowship but greatly enjoyed “digging deep” into different areas of pathology. Ultimate, she aims to incorporate her studies of healthcare policy and regulation, for which she earned a Master of Jurisprudence, and studies in compliance into her future work, which she hopes will include quality improvement and compliance.

Submit your abstract for the ASCP 2024 Annual Meeting in Chicago here.