Bank body
Scientists have collected a collection of "live" cancerous tumors
Maria Nedyuk, Izvestia
Sechenov University is creating a biobank in which parts of tissues and organs damaged by malignant tumors, as well as blood, saliva and other biomaterials of cancer patients will be stored. This unique collection will allow scientists to create new vaccines and diagnostic panels that can be used to detect cancer in the early stages. Human tumors will be vaccinated in mice to track how medications cope with the disease.
Cut and Save
With the development of pharmacology, the scientific community is increasingly faced with the issue of preclinical testing of new drugs on animals and individual human cells. There can be many solutions to this problem: from the creation of artificially grown tissues and organs to the genetic modification of living organisms, when they develop certain pathologies through artificial mutations.
One of the possible solutions is to create a biobank of tumor tissues. Mutated human tissues left after operations will be vaccinated in laboratory mice and new drugs will be tested on them.
Depending on the final requests of scientists, in addition to tissue pieces in the form of biopsies or whole tumors, scientists collect blood, plasma, urine, fragments of DNA or RNA molecules, bone marrow and much more.
Such a "collection" will help in the search for diagnostic biomarkers necessary for an adequate assessment of developing pathology, establishing links of genes with diseases and the search for new pharmacotherapeutic targets.
Freeze the tumor
Samples of various sizes are collected in the cryopreservation rooms, which are stored in refrigerators and liquid nitrogen. Storage temperatures are different, depending on the type of biomaterial sample: -40, -80 and -190 degrees. All samples are "alive", that is, the cells in them have not lost their viability due to proper freezing. Each "bank cell" with a separate drug is assigned to a certain research institute or other scientific organization, and its contents are issued upon presentation of documents, as in a regular bank.
The main goal of the staff of the Sechenov University biobank is to get the most complete collection of pathologies. Scientists have already collected the rarest samples of carcinomas, intestinal tumors and mammary glands.
Biobank participates in several major projects together with scientific organizations dealing with oncomedicine issues. One of them is the development of specific drugs and diagnostic systems for malignant neoplasms of the head and neck.
Scientists are also creating a panel of breast mutations that predetermine hereditary carcinogenesis, which will be applicable for screening during medical examination. Another project for which samples of intestinal tumors are collected is related to the study of the microbiota (diversity of bacteria) of the intestine in patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Scientists believe that by studying the bacterial sphere that surrounds real tumors, and those bacteria that live directly in it, it will be possible to detect the disease more effectively.
Scientists will have to complete all projects related to the collection of cancerous tumors within five years. In total, there are about 20 biobanks in Russia. In the world, there are more than 300 million biological samples in such repositories, thanks to which about 150 thousand different biomarkers have been discovered, which are used to diagnose various diseases.
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