Developing Quarantine Space for Isolation of Primary Cell Culture Models from Multiple Species
Principal Investigator: Santiago Peralta
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant):
Funding is for the purchase of a two-unit stacked VWR/Forma CO2 water jacketed incubator. This unit will serve to advance collaborative work I am pursuing with several researchers across the college and campus. Briefly, we have been studying canine oral squamous cell carcinomas. One aspect of this work has been to develop cell culture models from either patient tumors, or tumors derived from xenograft-bearing mice (PDX mouse models), in order to conduct first-line drug testing and hypothesize novel treatment strategies for this disease. One ongoing challenge in this work has been occasional cell culture contamination, particularly fungal contaminations. The current work environment allows for the use of one cell culture incubator, supplied by Dr. Richard Cerione and operated by my collaborator Dr. William Katt, which is currently shared among multiple projects (and multiple researchers). These fungal contaminations thus run the risk of spreading and contaminating the cell culture experiments of others using the incubator. While we are trying to optimize our protocols to reduce the incidence rate of contaminations, we are also interested in implementing new engineering controls, namely the requested incubator. This will allow us sufficient space to quarantine new cultures until their purity has been verified. Further, having more incubator space will make it easier to work with a larger number of cell cultures, will support the recruitment of a graduate student to work on the project, and will allow us to expand our work to other species, such as felines. Most of the funding sources I have found which might support ongoing and expanded work provide relatively small budgets and are intended to only support consumable supplies and services. Thus, this funding opportunity presents an optimal mechanism for improving the workspace and will help to demonstrate sufficient equipment to complete the project in future extracurricular grant proposals.