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Core Facilities
Core facilities are essential to the development of a research institute dedicated to the translation of discoveries into patient treatment. At present, BIIR scientists rely on eight cores to support their research:

 
Cell & Tissue Procurement Core This core is under the direction of Dr. Palucka and core lab manager Lynnette Walters, who has 15+ years of research & clinical laboratory experience. This core receives patient blood samples, which are processed, phenotyped and frozen. The samples are blinded using accession numbers and entered into a database. The core also processes volunteer and patient apheresis, generating WBC specific fractions. These fractions can be used in research experiments or vaccine production. Tissue samples, such as melanoma samples are also received in this core and cultured to establish cell lines for research.

Flow Cytometry Under the direction of Dr. Palucka, the facility is managed by a senior Research Assistant, Elizabeth Kraus, with nearly 20 years of experience in Flow Cytometry. The facility includes:

FACSVantage™ with turbo sort and three lasers
Two FACSCaliburs™ with two lasers
FACSARIA™ with three lasers to analyze up to thirteen parameters

GMP Cell Core Dr. Palucka directs this facility, which is managed by Susan Burkeholder, a senior technician with over 20 years of cell culture experience and six years of GMP manufacturing. Currently, the facility is approximately 300 square feet with two biosafety cabinets and 14 incubators . Given the success of our Cell Therapy program, we are in the process of designing and building a considerably larger facility. This facillity has released 360 DC vaccines that have been administered to patients. The cell core has been successfully FDA inspected.

Imaging Core Directed by Dr. Connolly, the facility is managed by a senior research assistant, Sandra Clayton, with twenty years of experience in microscopy. The facility includes:

LEICA SP-1 confocal microscope
Arcturus Pixcell Laser microdissector
Digital imaging system composed of two fluorescent microscopes (upright and inverted) allowing live cell imaging as well as analysis of whole mouse sections as pioneered by Dr. M. Jenkins
Post-imaging analysis workstation equipped with the Meta-morph software for image deconvolution and 3D rendering
Xenogen's IVIS® Imaging System, luciferase-based equipment that allows imaging within living animals
Immunospot Analyzer

Immunomonitoring Core Dr. Hideki Ueno directs this core facility, which performs flow cytometry, ELISA, ELISPOT, CTL assays and EPIMAX. Developed at BIIR, EPIMAX is a non-destructive assay that is used to measure immune responses:

across HLA haplotypes.
towards many antigens, allowing the analysis of a broad melanoma-specific repertoire.
by multiplex analysis of secreted cytokines, allowing the identification of the type of induced specific immunity.
and allows assessment of specific proliferation, thus addressing the quality of elicited T cells.
Molecular Biology Core This facility is under the direction of Dr. Chaussabel and includes
Prism® 7900HT Realtime PCR
Affymetryx Suite which includes an Agilent Analyzer, a complete Affymetryx GCS300 Scanner Workstation and a AIMS system utilizing an Oracle database.
Illumina BeadStation 500X multi-sample gene expression system featuring microarrays configured for whole genome or custom focused gene sets.

Monoclonal Antibody Core Under the direction of Dr. Zurawski, this core includes three research assistants. Currently, the core has generated mouse monoclonal antibodies to human interferon-alpha as a potential treatment of SLE. A large panel of monoclonal antibodies specific to human DC subsets is being prepared.

Multiplex Luminex® Core Under Dr. Connolly's direction, this core is supported by the NIAID-BIIR Center. We measure cytokines, while initially relying on commercial kits that need to be validated, the core will eventually develop its own assays as dictated by the findings of BIIR investigators.