Core--Tissue culture and procurement

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

The primary goal of this proposal is to establish a tissue procurement and culture facility at Meharry which specializes in the propagation of breast and prostate cell lines and primaries. This facility will help booster the cancer research community here at Meharry and provide scarce cell lines such as those from African Americans to the Vanderbilt research community. The individual goals of this proposal are to: 1) Procure breast and prostate tumor from African American patients and establish these as cell lines, 2) maintain these tissues in liquid nitrogen or paraffin blocks for interested investigators, 3) maintain in culture and liquid nitrogen all the currently available breast and prostate cancer cell lines and other lines of other tumors that are of interest to scientists here at Meharry, 4) Provide basic training in the culture of tumor cells to interested investigators, and 5) distribute the cell lines to the investigators. These represent for the most part, procedures that are already in place and being performed in a highly cost effective manner. We hope to establish as many cell cultures and cell lines as possible from tumor specimens obtained from back patients. We intend to use these cell lines as model systems to address the following questions: 1) Can we identify biochemical or molecular markers unique to breast or prostate cancer specimens obtained from blacks? 2) How susceptible or resistant are cell lines from blacks to chemotherapeutic agents? And 3) can cell lines established from blacks be used to design treatment protocols tailed for black patients who do not respond to established protocols for he general public? We have established a normal breast cell lines (V8) from a woman who was diagnosed with familial breast cancer at age 24. This cell line is currently widely used by scientists were at Meharry and Vanderbilt.