This chapter explains the steps necessary to perform laser surgery upon single adherent mammalian cells, where individual organelles are extracted from the cells by optical tweezers and the cells are monitored post-surgery to check their viability. Single-cell laser nanosurgery is ...
In vitro characterization of nanoparticles is becoming increasingly important due to the rapid development of novel nanoparticle formulations for applications in the field of nanomedicine and related areas. Commonly, nanoparticles are simply characterized with respect to t ...
Zwitterionic phospholipid vesicles are known to adsorb and ultimately rupture on flat silicon dioxide (SiO2) surfaces to form supported lipid bilayers. Surface topography, however, alters the kinetics and mechanistic details of vesicles adsorption, which under certain condi ...
The quinonoid anthracycline, doxorubicin (Adriamycin), is a widely used potent antineoplastic agent, showing the broadest spectrum of antineoplastic activity against various types of solid carcinomas, hematological malignancies, and soft tissue sarcomas. Unfortunat ...
Environmental pH has a determining role in the structure of biomolecules, thus playing an important role in regulating cellular activities. Eukaryotic cells must, therefore, strive to stringently regulate pH in various intracellular organelles so as to confer normal functioning at ...
Lipophilic formulation is an invaluable technique for the delivery of cancer drugs. Incorporation of poorly soluble and toxic compounds into a lipophilic carrier vehicle improves both the stability and compatibility in blood and body fluids. Currently, although a large proportion ...
Blood handling routines have been worked out that result in consistent protein analytic results in clinical practice. It would seem reasonable to build on this experience when devising handling routines for new protein biomarker discovery. Consequently, normal blood sample handl ...
Human biobanks, and genetic research databases, as referred to by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), are essential tools for modern biomedical research. Biobanks may consist in collections created in clinical diagnosis (such as pathology tissue sa ...
The sequencing of the human genome, completed at the dawn of the twenty-first century, allows researchers to integrate new data on genetic risk factors with demographic and lifestyle data collected via modern communication technologies. The technical prerequisites now exist for mer ...
Tissue microarray (TMA) technology is a robust “high throughput” method of tissue analysis, whereby a large number of patient samples can be examined in a short time using a minimum number of slides. In a TMA, cylinders of tissue are cored out of formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue blocks and s ...
Attempts to find genes contribution to complex diseases, such as cancer, require new study designs which incorporate an efficient use of population resources and modern genotyping technologies. We describe here two approaches, used by us for the study of breast cancer, both of which take the u ...
An important feature in “Good Biobanking Practices” is to monitor and log conditions of sample storing devices. The Institute of Laboratory Medicine at Landspitali University Hospital in Reykjavik, Iceland, has installed a temperature monitoring and alarm system for freezers, inc ...
Since RNA is believed to be the most vulnerable molecular component of unfixed tissue, preserved RNA integrity can be used as a general quality indicator in fresh frozen tissue biobanks. As the size of samples and biopsies often is small, in the range of millimeters or milligrams, it is important to imp ...
There are currently multiple international bodies suggesting legal and ethical frameworks for regulating international biobank research. One will for obvious reasons find inconsistencies in terminology and differences in procedures suggested for biobank research amo ...
The Nordic countries have a long tradition of large-scale biobanking and comprehensive, population-based health data registries linkable on unique personal identifiers, enabling follow-up studies spanning many decades. Joint Nordic biobank-based studies provide unique ...
The routine health services collect large amount of samples for biobanking, particularly in clinical laboratory medicine, mainly for clinical diagnostic purposes. These samples provide a large-scale and clinically relevant biobanking infrastructure that can be used for rese ...
The Nordic countries have a long tradition of register-based epidemiologic studies. Numerous population-based specialized registers offer high-quality data from individuals, and the extensive use of register data further improves the quality of the registers. Unique person ...
A review is given on design options to be considered in epidemiologic studies on cancers or other chronic diseases in relation to risk factors, the measurement of which is based on stored specimens in large biobanks. The two major choices for valid and cost-efficient sampling of risk factor data fr ...
The European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) is a multi-center prospective cohort study designed to investigate the relationship between nutrition and cancer, with the potential for studying many etiologic or genetic factors as well as other disease end ...
The AIDS and Cancer Specimen Resource (ACSR) is a cooperative agreement among the United States National Cancer Institute (NCI) (Office of the Director, Office of HIV and AIDS Malignancy (OHAM)) and regional US consortia, University of California, San Francisco (West Coast), George Washi ...