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Posts Tagged ‘primary cells’
HER2 / Neu and Breast Cancer | Refractory Cancer | Conversant
Monday, August 24th, 2009
Can you collect clinical specimens from Herceptin non-responders? That’s a question we get often. Let me give you a little background then address that question directly…
Breast cancer – including ductal carcinoma in situ, invasive/infiltrating ductal, and invasive/infiltrating lobular – is a common diagnosis at Conversant’s clinical cancer Sites (a “Site” to us is any place where we consent patients and collect samples ie. a hospital, clinic, or physician practice). For example, in 2008 our Sites saw over 275 newly diagnosed breast cancer patients, 25 (or 9%) of which were pre-chemotherapy Stage IV Breast Cancer patients.
9% Stage IV disease is a significant improvement versus previous years. That points to a successful, new, aggressive push for screening plus some major advances in diagnostic technology.
Improved diagnosis is one part; the other part is improved treatment. That’s why I’m posting this blog…
Treatment Options
Everyone who has been around the cancer research world for any period of time has heard about HER2/Neu (also known as ErbB-2, ERBB2) which stands for “Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor 2″; a protein giving higher aggressiveness in breast cancers.
We also know Trastuzumab (“Herceptin”) – developed by Genentech and FDA approved in 1998 – is a monoclonal antibody that interferes with the HER2/neu receptor and reverses the effects of an overactive HER2 receptor. In order to be used, physicians will score breast cancer tissue with IHC and FISH… scores of 0 and 1+ are negative (don’t treat), scores of 3+ are positive (treat).
Studies conducted by academia and industry both show that approximately 25% of breast cancer patients have tumors that are HER2+. Herceptin is a highly effective treatment for many of these patients.
What About Herceptin “Non-Responders”
Because the fight for better therapies in breast cancer is always ongoing, many researchers are focused on improving upon the currently available treatment options. That’s where we can help.
Conversant collects clinical specimens from patients at initial diagnosis and follows them throughout their treatment course. Using the Herceptin non-responders example, we can (and do) collect clinical specimens (like PBMC, Serum, Whole Blood, and even Circulating Tumor Cells) from these patients… enabling our research clients to study refractory or n0n-responder patient population.
There’s a whole lot more to it and – if you are interested – I would love to talk with you. Give us a call anytime at (866) 838-2798.
More next week…
San Francisco, a biotechnology HUB!| Conversant
Friday, May 1st, 2009
Conversant has been busy… over the past 3 weeks I have been traveling all over the United States talking with companies and researchers about our Human Primary Cells, our Circulating Tumor Cells, and our other products and services. As you might imagine, our clients lead us in some very interesting directions with our products… and they also lead us all over the country and even the world. But there is just something really unique about the San Francisco biotech community.
From downtown San Francisco to South San Francisco, to Redwood City, to Palo Alto, to Sunnyvale, our cancer, hematology, and immunology research Clients are up to some pretty amazing research.
They study B-Cells, they study CD34+ cells, they study Circulating Tumor cells, they extract cancer DNA and cancer RNA, and they generally wow me everytime I have a chance to visit. All this traveling has been great to see and gives me a ton of confidence in our economy. Thank all of you for including Conversant in your research studies; we appreciate your business.
2009 American Association for Cancer Research (“AACR”) | Conversant
Friday, April 24th, 2009
We had a great time at this year’s AACR conference in Denver this week. It was fascinating to see the amount of interest and buzz around Circulating Tumor Cells (“CTC”) and Circulating Endothelial Cells (“CEC”). Industry and Academic scientists are extremely focused on studying these rare cells.
This has proven difficult for a couple of reasons:
1. Access – it is very difficult to get access to Stage IV metastatic cancer patients. Additionally, the commercially available Veridex assay is really only optimized for breast and prostate cancer.
2. Scarcity of Cells – in circulation, these CTCs are very rare… 1 cell per 1.0mL is considered a “high reading”
That is where we come in. We have access to pre-screened CTC patients. In other words, we know which Metastatic patients have CTCs and we can collect blood from them. This has opened up research possibilities for our clients that never before existed.
We are excited about the direction of this research, and we are very pleased that we are able to help researchers.
Human CD19+ B Cells in CLL | Tips and Tricks | Conversant
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
Today we hosted Mike Warnement, our regional technical sales representative from STEMCELL Technologies. Mike was a great resource to us as we further refine our primary cell isolation methods from periperal blood mononuclear cells (“PMBC”) and bone marrow mononuclear cells (“BMMC”) for Chronic Lymphoid Leukemia (“CLL”) specimens.
Because we can collect fresh whole blood and fresh bone marrow samples from Chronic Lymphoid Leukemia patients and deliver them overnight, we get a lot of requests for CLL. We’re also getting more and more requests for isolation of PBMC, BMMC, but also CD19+ B Cells from CLL patients. We not only can deliver CD19+ B Cells with over 96% purity, but we also extract DNA, RNA, and fix B Cells upon request.
We were also glad to have Prof. Catherine Sanders, a research investigator from Dr. Jian Han’s Lab, join us in our lab as we worked through our quality assurance protocols for enumeration, purity, and CD19+ B Cell specificity. Their work has often included our primary cells in the areas of hematology, cancer, and lupus.
Using a variety of STEMCELL’s technologies, we’re fast on our way to isolating wide varieties of primary cells from CLL, Acute Myeloid Leukemia, Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, and other diseased cells and normal cells.
AML PBMCs used to blueprint cancer genetics | Conversant
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
Emily, one of our lab scientists, ran across a very interesting article today published by the BBC entitled “Cancer genetic blueprint revealed”. In the article a team from The Washington University identified 10 gene mutations which appeared key to the development of the woman’s Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (also known as “AML”, “Acute Myelogenous Leukemia”, or Acute Myeloid Leukemia”), fast-growing cancer of the blood and bone marrow.
We find this type of research fascinating and pretty exciting for a number of reasons.
1. We’re collaborating on several leukemia-related cancer genetics projects – particularly in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (“CML”) – with researchers from both industry and academia. Thorough our collaborations with the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (“HudsonAlpha” or “HAIB”), we look forward to helping them contribute to the understanding of the genetic diversity of cancer. To read more about HudsonAlpha, visit the Myers lab (lead by P.I. Rick Myers, Ph.D.) and The Han lab (lead by P.I. Jian Han, M.D., Ph.D.).
2. Through our research in leukemia (AML, CML, and CLL primarily) and affiliation with HudsonAlpha, we’ve also had the opportunity to get to know geneticist Dr. Francis Collins, a former director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute. Dr. Collins continues to lead the genetics field with his work and it is great to see his interest in this article.
3. We’re continuing to see the strong push in all areas of discovery science toward the use of primary cells versus cell lines. As it continues to be proven, primary cells are advantageous because primary cells (peripheral blood mononuclear cells and bone marrow mononuclear cells) better represent disease diversity in discovery research in AML, CML, CLL, PV, and other conditions.
We hope to see more articles, more research, and more discoveries in AML (and other leukemias) in the near future.
Oncology and Hematology | Welcome to our blog!
Sunday, March 8th, 2009
We are very excited about this new website and our new blog. It will allow us to serve you better by delivering helpful, up-to-the-minute content in a format that is easy to use. As we go about writing this blog, we will try to incorporate and include others by providing hyperlinks to other information. This information may be from us, our collaborators, our vendors, or even just things we want you to know about and enjoy.
Those of you that are just hearing about Conversant, welcome! I think you will find us to be open, responsive, and willing to do anything we can to empower your research. Those of you returning, thank you for your business and your friendship.
Conversant has been very busy in 2009; we have expanded our product line to include whole blood for Circulating Tumor Cells, primary cells from hematologic malignancies, as well as serum and plasma for biomarker discovery. We look forward to sharing our progress and our new products and services with you through this blog.
You can also expect highly relevant and interesting things from this blog… you will hear from our employees, our partners, and hopefully some of you.
Please follow our blog by subscribing at right (we will never spam you).
Thank you for your interest in Conversant.
Luke