Tianjin Cancer Institute>Research>Core Facilities and Services>Core Laboratory


Introduction


In line with Tianjin medical university cancer hospital’s overall teaching and research development objectives, to strengthen and enhance the fundamental and applied research, to cultivate top-notch creative talent, and to ensure that the available research resources will be efficiently used, our hospital organized and set up in 2009Public Experimentation Center, located on thesixth floor of Building C.


After several years of investment and construction, and relying on the strengths of our faculty and technology, our centerhave evolved into a comprehensive research center dotted with logical organization, high efficiency, opening-up, and advanced technology.
The center consists of four technical service-orientedplatforms, i.e., the core facility and technical service Platform, the Clinical Laboratory, the SPF Animal Laboratory andtheBioinformatics Platform.The center covers an area of about 2000 m2, the value is worth over 50 million RMB.

Now, the Public Laboratory is not only an important experimental base for conducting scientific research and translational medicine research, but also a supporting platform for cultivating top-notch creative medical talent.


Services


1. The core facility and technical service platform is funded by Tianjin medical university cancer institute & hospital. The establishment of this platform will provide centralized and expertise support to our colleagues requiring these advanced technology platforms in their research studies. It will enhance effective usage of resources and maximize the use of expensive instruments required for these advanced technology platforms. The platform is equipped with Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope, Flow Cytometer, Upright Fluorescent Microscope, Inverted Fluorescent Microscope, Real-Time PCR apparatus, Ultra-Centrifuge and so on.The appointments software (LIMS) has been used deeply along with the servicesto enhance service abilityand to improve the service efficiency.



2. The clinical laboratory is a research platform for translational medicine. The objective of the clinical laboratory is to provide multidisciplinary scientists from different faculty of TJMUCH a synergistic platform which efficiently and effectively translate basic scientific findings into knowledge that benefits patients, which is often described as an effort to carry scientific knowledge ‘from bench to bedside’. At present, we have 17 different research groups at the clinical laboratory, all of which engage in cutting-edge research. The research group (under the management of principal investigator) is a group of researchers or students from the same faculty working together on a particular issue or topic. In this way we hope to stretch boundaries, challenge traditional ways of thinking, and innovate towards finding new solutions to problems. Now, the clinical laboratory is home to world-class research facilities, a specialist clinical trials unit and a suite of molecular biology laboratories.



3. The SPF Animal Laboratory, with a total floor area of about 500 m2, is a comprehensive service entity involved in research of Laboratory Animal Science, providing technical support and services for animal research. It includes SPF (Specific-pathogen-free) barrier environment, conventional environment and functional auxiliary environment. Relevant environmental facilities obtained the experimental animal use license (SYXK (Tianjin) 2012-0005) issued by Tianjin Municipal Science and Technology Commission in 2012, and successfully replaced the new experimental animal use license (SYXK (Tianjin) 2017-0005) in 2017, providing a strong guarantee for the scientific research of our discipline.Our staff provides daily animal care for the 15,000 animals used in research and teaching hospital-wide. Our goal remains to support the needs of our biomedical research community by providing an optimal environment for their animals and research.



4. Our research focuses on characterizing mutational landscape of human gastrointestinal cancer, elucidating the association between mutational footprints and environmental factors, identifying biomarkers with translational significance in immunotherapy and early cancer diagnosis, and interpreting medical imaging data using deep learning algorithms. Through bioinformatics analyses, we identified new driver genes underlying the development of gastrointestinal cancer, and shed new lights on genetic markers that are potentially clinically actionable. By applying deep learning algorithm to analyze large-scale sonographic imaging data, we developed a deep learning model that could augment radiologists’ ability in thyroid cancer diagnosis. We have published more than 20 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, including Lancet Oncology, JAMA Oncology, and Annals of Oncology etc.