I have recently been appointed to start-up my laboratory at Deakin University, Geelong, Australia and as a researcher that has worked in the field of cancer, drug discovery and therapeutics, understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms of cancers and developing new therapies for them has always been an area that I have been passionate about and interested in. As a new laboratory head, I am hoping to establish a lab that focuses primarily on childhood cancer research and this will be the first and only lab that currently works on childhood cancers, within my department and the region. In order to establish this, I am currently in the process of obtaining cell lines from different childhood patient derived cancers which I believe will significantly help build my research capacity and future collaborations.
Some of the major obstacles that I am currently facing in obtaining human biospecimens is the lack of established repositories in Australia and the few biobanks that are running have limited samples that can be distributed to external researcher. Further to this, my institute is located in a regional area of Victoria in Australia making it even more difficult to establish facilities that are able to generate patient derived cell lines, mainly due to the costs involved, lack of consent from patients and due to the low number of childhood cancer patients. This has made it very difficult for me to obtain a good panel of cell lines and tumor samples that I can use for my research work. Access to the biospecimens from CBTN will hopefully help with conducting the research projects in my lab and will also help generate data for future research project, grants and publications.
I have requested as pediatric brain cancer cell lines from the Children’s Oncology Group, however they have very few brains cancer cell lines.
