The Hematopoietic and Therapeutic Support (HATS) Service [formerly the Graft Engineering Laboratory (Gel)] provides support services to the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions including peer reviewed, funded developmental core services to the bone marrow transplantation program. This expanded core service (of which the GEL remains an integral part) now includes several multidisciplinary services, facilities and personnel in the Johns Hopkins Departments of Oncology and Pathology. The ultimate goal of the HATS Service is to provide a common pathway to expedite the process of translating new therapies and protocols into clinical trials. This facility has become the sole Cancer Center resource for hematopoietic cell manipulation, therapeutic apheresis (including cytopheresis), cellular expansion, bone marrow and stem cell collection and regulatory oversight of cellular therapy protocols. Specifically, HATS' major functions are 1) to support, adapt develop and implement the clinical use of quality-controlled cellular products as required by all 5 projects and 2) to serve as a core resource for hematopoietic/lymphoid tissues essential to individual projects. The HATS Service itself does hot perform clinical or laboratory research. HATS contains equipment for investigational drugs/devices, bone marrow (BM) peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC), lymphoid and tumor cell collection, incubators for cell culture, programmed cryogenic freezing, liquid nitrogen storage, chemo-purging of BM and PBSC grafts and graft manipulation, lymphoid processing and expansion, cell procurement/manipulation for breast cancer and hematologic malignancies vaccine development and a broader scope of clinical applications of transplantation. One of the major challenges of this core function will be to ensure that the PO1 investigator's newly developed clinical trials involving somatic cell therapy are in compliance with the various regulatory agencies.
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