CORE FACILITIES PROVIDE GATES CENTER MEMBERS WITH ACCESS TO STATE-OF-THE-ART EQUIPMENT, TECHNOLOGY AND EXPERTISE
In last year’s annual report, we introduced the new Organoid Core, to which Gates Center members will have discounted access beginning in 2021. Drs. Bruce Appel and Peter Dempsey, co-directors of this core, anticipate that the core facility will be fully operational by late spring 2021. During 2020, the Gates Center leadership team began discussions to provide Gates Center members with discounted access to two additional core facilities on campus, the Genomics Core and the Human Immune Monitoring Shared Resource. Both these cores are well established; the Genomics Core was launched in 1999 as one of the original shared resources in the University of Colorado Cancer Center, and the Human Immune Monitoring Shared Resource (HIMSR), was created in 2016 as part of the Human Immunology Immunotherapy Initiative supported by the University of Colorado School of Medicine. The Gates Center is very pleased to be able to leverage existing infrastructure so that members can have subsidized access to existing cutting-edge equipment and technology beyond what is now available in other Gates Center subsidized cores. For example, the Genomics Core recently purchased Visium Spatial Gene Expression technology from 10X Genomics for its facility. Visium Spatial Gene Expression is a next-generation molecular technology for classifying tissue based on total mRNA. This technology will allow Gates Center members to map the whole transcriptome with morphological context to discover novel insights into normal development, disease pathology and clinical translational research. Similarly, the HIMSR leveraged resources from across campus to obtain one of five IonPath’s Multiple Ion Beam Imaging (MIBI) beta units in operation worldwide. Two commercial MIBI units have now been released, and the HIMSR unit received a commercial upgrade in January 2021. The MIBI allows single cell analysis in situ using antibodies tagged with isotopically pure metal reporters to image up to 100 target proteins or RNAs in fresh-frozen and fixed tissue, with a five-log dynamic range and 100 nanometer cellular resolution.
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Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine
