Tumour modelling facilitates the study of tumour growth in the tumour microenvironment (TME). Therapies that affect the tumour microenvironment are critical for advancing the fight against cancer as emerging therapies target the network of signaling pathways essential for tumour growth, Epithelial Mesenchymal Transition and metastasis (ex. Wnt/ß-Catenin pathway). Patient derived tumour models, including melanoma cell lines, are invaluable tools to study normal and malignant cells, tumour formation and drug resistance.

Rockland Immunochemicals Inc. has partnered with the Wistar Research Institute, to produce and validate a diverse panel of low passage melanoma cell lines from freshly excised metastases. More than 100 melanoma cell lines are grouped for BRAF, N-RAS, KIT, PTEN and CDK4 mutations.  These pre-clinical tumour cell lines models can be used to identify the critical target genes and pathways enacted by genomic alterations and lead to more accurately prediction of the effectiveness of novel cancer therapeutics and facilitate cancer research.

Functionality and viability of primary cells can be impaired by incorrect thawing procedures, storage or culture conditions. It’s generally admitted that applying the same protocols as for cell lines leads will lead to bad cell quality. Well, based on our experience with primary cells, here are a few tips you can follow to ensure you get the best performance.

The islets of Langerhans are the regions of the pancreas that contain its endocrine (i.e., hormone-producing) cells. Discovered in 1869 by German pathological anatomist Paul Langerhans, the islets of Langerhans constitute approximately 1% to 2% of the mass of the pancreas. There are about one million islets distributed throughout the pancreas of a healthy adult human. Each is separated from the surrounding pancreatic tissue by a thin fibrous connective tissue capsule. The islets of Langerhans contain beta cells, which secrete insulin, and play a significant role in diabetes.

Islets are widely used for transplantation to restore beta cell function from diabetes, offering an alternative to a complete pancreas transplantation or an artificial pancreas. Because the beta cells in the islets of Langerhans are selectively destroyed by an autoimmune process in type 1 diabetes, islet transplantation is a means of restoring physiological beta cell function in patients with type 1 diabetes.

Human Islets for Research (HIR)® are primary human islets processed from organ donor pancreases that have been approved for research but not for clinical transplantation of either the  pancreas or the isolated islets. HIR® are obtained in a proprietary process of pancreas digestion and islet purification that results in uniformly high quality HIR® for delivery to diabetes  investigators. Quality Control (QC) testing is routinely performed prior to release to assure uniform quality and function of these islets available for research.

Hearing about results from other researchers is always interesting – we’d like to share a testimonial from our first customer using Human Liver Lysosomes. You can get an idea of how these performed in their experiments.

“Our experiments went fantastically well – we see some potential in the material as a tool to generate metabolites of interest in higher yields than the typical systems. See attached a snapshot of one experiment where we incubated a X compound in development with Hepatocytes, Microsomes and the Lysosomes you provided us with. With Lysosomes we were able to generate a metabolite (M6) with significantly higher yields and this is great because it may be a useful tool to allow full characterization of metabolites”

Learn more about Human Liver Lysosomes here: Opening a new era in catabolism models

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