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Bachelor’s thesis within Health & Life Sciences

Date:21 July 2018

To get a better view of different majors and what different students focus upon within these, this blogpost summarizes different thesis the students of the class of 2018 have written. The last semester of UCG, students spend 7.5 study-credits on their bachelor’s thesis (for reference, sixty credits should be taken every year). The thesis is really the individual end-project of a student’s UCG-career and students use this to investigate their specific area of interest within their major. After choosing a subject, they will choose a supervisor – any RUG teacher – that guides the process and ultimately grades it.

This blogpost gives a short summary of two thesis done in the major Health & Life Sciences, written by Laura von Iven and Petra Buursma.

Immuno-oncology

Laura wrote her bachelor thesis in the field of immuno-oncology, a form of cancer treatment. For her research she did a three-months internship in the oncology lab at UMCG, working together with a PhD student.

The underlying mechanism of immuno-oncology is to reactivate the immune system of the patient to target the tumor. In her research, Laura tested the bispecific T-cell engager (BiTE) muS110 in immunocompetent as well as immunodeficient mice. Such a BiTE forms a direct link between an immune cell and a tumor cell and via this connection, the immune cell gets activated to potentially induce killing of the tumor cell. To evaluate the distribution of the drug within the whole mouse body, the BiTE got labeled with radioactivity. By means of PET imaging, cell histology and autoradiography an analysis of the distribution could be performed not only on organ-level but also on the cellular level.

Child obesity predictors

Petra wrote her thesis on the question whether physical activity is a determinant for childhood obesity. In her research, she examined the effect of physical activity intensities at 5 years old on BMI at 10 years old.

In total, 734 children had valid data for physical activity measurements and BMI at both 5 and 10 years old, and these children were divided into overweight and non-overweight groups. Petra used statistical analysis of the data on physical activity to find intensities of physical activity as a predictor for BMI at 10 years old and change in BMI between 5 and 10 years old, to ultimately answer the question if physical activity is a predictor for becoming overweight or non-overweight. The results indicated there is no significant association between physical activity levels at 5 years old and BMI at 10 years old. From here, she concluded that BMI at 5 years old is a strong predictor for BMI at 10 years old and early on physical activity would only minimally change this.

Kind regards,

Tamara, 3rd Year UCG student