Pioneer Valley Life Sciences Institute Of Baystate Medical

Breast cell repository description: normal cells from a diverse cohort of patients is needed to identify the cellular mechanisms responsible for the wide variation in responses to therapies among individuals. This effort focuses on creation of normal breast epithelial cells that reflect the variation in the population of women. Methods are used to expand the cells in vitro providing a versatile source for testing differences in sensitivity to environmental contaminants and therapeutic compounds. Accomplishments: breast cells from 500 individuals and growing. Procedures to immortalize normal breast cells from most patients have been established. We have established immortalized cell lines from normal breast epithelium from 17 donors representing diverse breast cancer risk. The cell lines are genetically stable and unique based on genetic fingerprinting. These are being used to determine differences in susceptibility to oncogenic transformation caused by chemicals and altered cell signaling.

Biospecimen resources & molecular analysis facilitydescription: the facility maintains the equipment and personnel to provide histological services. This group also assists investigators with maintaining irb approvals for tissue procurement. Accomplishments: support services (histology, molecular analyses) has been used by investigators from umass amherst, umass medical school, baystate health systems as well as serving other academic scientists.

Ovarian registry:description: as ovarian cancer is very difficult to screen for and thus is often not caught early enough, studies developing non-invasive blood tests for ovarian cancer are warranted. We have established a registry for women undergoing surgery for suspicious ovarian masses. We currently have 137 ovarian tissues and matching bloods from women. Of these approximately 102 have some degree of low grade or high grade malignancy.