Our primary objective at Asterand is to help our customers reach their goals in human tissue based research. This means not only that we carefully check the quality of the tissues in our repository and the associated data in our database, but we are constantly working to develop advanced technologies to maximize the results that can be obtained with the tissues. Asterand has recently adopted the use of Agilent’s RNA integrity number (RIN) since the absolute ratio of the 28S to 18S ribosomal RNA bands have been shown to be an unreliable marker for quality and usability of total RNA isolated (Imbeaud, et al. 2005; Alhasan, et al, 2006). Another developmental example is the new method we developed to perform immunohistochemistry with human antibodies. Our paper describing this method was recently accepted for publication by the Journal of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry. The results demonstrate that our method minimizes non-specific staining and is more sensitive than direct labeling of the antibody with biotin. We have also extended this work to formalin fixed paraffin embedded tissues that are the standard for pathology diagnoses. This process provides excellent fixation of tissues for sectioning, staining and microscopic examination. However, it leaves the DNA and RNA highly degraded. We have developed expertise to amplify DNA from these samples for genotyping studies and to amplify RNA for gene expression studies. Now it is possible to use fixed samples that were collected for diagnosis of cancer years ago where outcome data can be obtained for studies on prognostic biomarkers.
Asterand also has a number of human tumor cell lines (click here) that can help cancer researchers. There are 9 breast cancer lines that represent stages of cancer progression from very early (MCF10DCIS.com) to late metastatic (SUM-44PE, SUM-52PE, SUM-185PE and SUM-229PE). For prostate cancer research, Asterand offers 3 unique pairs of lines that were derived from tumors and their matching adjacent normal tissues. Much of the characterization of these lines has been performed in Asterand’s laboratories. A growing number of customers have been taking advantage of Asterand’s tissue culture experience to prepare cultures of primary cells isolated from a variety of tumor and normal tissues. Some of these cells have been cryopreserved so that they can be supplied any time (click here).