Core facility helps researchers 'sort it out'
Heather Daley (left) and Darlys Schott help staff the cell manipulation facility.
Whenever stem cells are harvested — whether from the bone marrow or circulating blood — they are processed before being transplanted into a patient. Depending on the patient's condition or the protocol of a particular clinical trial, processing can involve removing tumor cells or other contaminants from a sample, extracting the T cells responsible for graft-versus-host disease, stimulating the growth of T cells capable of attacking leukemia, or a variety of other steps.
At Dana-Farber, the site of this high-tech sifting and separating is the Connell and O'Reilly Families Cell Manipulation Core Facility, a lab established in 1996 by William and Margot Connell to honor their friends Vincent and Annette O'Reilly. This unit provides a range of services for researchers throughout the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, a collaboration of seven Harvard-affiliated hospitals and schools.
Located in DFCI's Dana building and slated for a move to larger, updated quarters, the lab handles processing for both standard transplants and those performed in clinical trials. Its 10-member staff works with specialized equipment able to count the number of stem cells (often in the tens of millions) and categorize the cells in a tissue sample, purge unwanted cells and multiply desired ones, and purify and store samples as needed. The facility also plays a central role in preparing cancer vaccines used in clinical trials.
"The lab was created with the idea that cellular products should be processed with the same attention to safety and consistency as products in the blood-component laboratory," says Director Jerome Ritz, MD. "We provide quality assurance for the entire stem cell manipulation process."
