The purchase of the Illumina Beadstation 500 will allow our microarray facility to move from using an in house cDNA platform for gene expression studies to a commercial platform that provides a better service at a price comparable to what we now charge. This comes at a time when it would be necessary to remake the PCR products for our in house arrays to continue their production, a costly and time consuming process. The purchase of the Illumina Beadstation 500 will also allow us to provide a better and more complete platform for gene expression studies than the one we have been using and one which will provide data that can easily be compared and confirmed by other investigators using this platform. Since the transcript coverage is the same as the Affymetrix gene expression platform, comparisons across these platforms will also be possible. In addition to gene expression studies, we will now be able to offer new genomic services that we could not previously provide. The new services will include SNP genotyping, gene expression using fixed samples, gene copy number changes and DNA methylation studies, thus providing access to a more complete panel of genetic assessment platforms. We have presented projects, and in some cases preliminary results from pilot studies, that describe experiments requiring access to each of these technologies as the Wistar faculty and users at other academic institutions move into new studies with important health related objectives. These projects include programs to develop biomarkers for early detection of lung cancer, which remains a primary cause of cancer related deaths, a project to identify characteristics of melanoma stem cells, which may lead to new targets for therapy for this recalcitrant cancer, a project to map the complex traits for regeneration in a mouse model system that may lead to new ways of thinking about repair processes in organs, and new studies to identify markers for response to therapy in both lung cancer and Cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. Access to these technologies will be important for new grant applications and to expand our services to include the assessment of genetic changes that are not detectable at the levels of gene expression. ? ? ?
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