FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
April 23, 2003

CANCER CENTER INTERN WINS AWARD

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Nichole Farneth, an undergraduate in the UC Davis biotechnology program, has been tapped to receive a UC Davis Community Service Award for her volunteer work in the laboratory of Paul Gumerlock, associate professor of hematology-oncology.

Farneth, 20, began working in Gumerlock's lab last summer through an unpaid internship arranged by the Internship and Career Center on the Davis campus. Originally planned as a one-quarter experience, the internship is now in its fourth quarter. While Farneth committed to work only three or four hours a week, she routinely puts in up to 18. Since last June, she's spent more than 450 hours in Research III, a 49,485 square-foot, three-story cancer research building on the UC Davis Medical Center campus in Sacramento.

A junior who hopes to pursue a career in cancer research, Farneth has been running Western blot and Elisa assays on cells collected from lung cancer patients enrolled in a clinical trial at UC Davis Cancer Center. "I love it," she says. "I'm so happy. I like doing experiments. ItŐs so exciting to me when I get good results."

Raised in Vacaville, Farneth has wanted to help cure cancer since she was four years old and her great-grandmother died of ovarian cancer. Farneth turned to her grandmother, Bette Peat, of Fairfield, for answers. "I wanted to know why my great-grandmother died, and my grandma said it was because the doctors couldn't fix her."

Farneth remembers telling Peat, "Well, when I grow up, I'm going to change that."

In an essay required to renew her internship, Farneth described her motivation this way: "I want to be able to look at a data sheet one day, and see that all of the patients on the clinical trial are still alive, and to imagine how happy they are with their families."

UC Davis Cancer Center, the only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center between San Francisco and Portland, Ore., serves about 3,000 new patients a year from throughout Northern California, southern Oregon and western Nevada.

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