ATCC Collaboration Aimed At Pancreatic Cancer Biomarker Development
Manassas, VA - ATCC (American Type Culture Collection) today announced a research collaboration with The Valley Hospital of Ridgewood, New Jersey that will help speed the development and validation of biomarkers for the early detection and treatment of pancreatic cancer.
The Valley Hospital will provide ATCC scientists with high-quality and highly annotated tissue from patients who agreed to allow their resected pancreatic tumors to be used in future studies. ATCC will conduct the biomarker discovery research. Valley will also provide stored blood and practical clinical perspectives on validation and application of the collaboration's biomarker discoveries.
"ATCC's collaboration with The Valley Hospital exemplifies ATCC's commitment to translational research," remarked Dr. Cohava Gelber, ATCC Chief Science and Technology Officer. "I'm confident that combining the capabilities of The Valley Hospital's tissue acquisition and clinical experience with the systems biology approach of ATCC will make for a successful collaboration."
The ATCC research team will subject the pancreatic cancer samples to a proprietary biomarker discovery platform. The platform consists of integrated proteomics, genomics, bioinformatics and immunology paradigm and has already demonstrated effectiveness in uncovering novel biomarkers for type 2 diabetes*.
This collaboration will focus on finding biomolecules that enable early detection, therapeutic monitoring and potentially treatment of pancreatic cancer. ATCC scientists will also utilize the ATCC Cell Biology Collection to test for the presence or absence of various biomarkers across a wide range of cell lines. ATCC and The Valley Hospital will form a Joint Research and Development Committee of scientists and physicians to consult on the objectives and progress of the research initiatives.
Approximately 30,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer are diagnosed in the U.S. each year. Because the early stages of the disease are often asymptomatic, pancreatic cancer has the highest fatality rate of all cancers.
"Early detection is often a key to positive cancer disease prognosis, and that is especially true for pancreatic tumors," said Dr. Ganepola A. P. Ganepola, medical director at the Valley Hospital Center for Cancer Research and Genomic Medicine and developer of the specimen bank. "Discovering indicators that predict pancreatic cancer would be a major step forward in lowering the disease's lethality."
SOURCE: ATCC