Laboratory at UI plays major role in diagnos...( The unique laboratory of Dr. David ...),Health

The unique laboratory of Dr. David R. Soll at the University of Iowa is making a big footprint in the field of cancer research, thanks to a new agreement reached between Soll and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health.

The NCI and its $104 million Clinical Proteomics Technologies Initiative for Cancer (http://proteomics.cancer.gov) recently selected the Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank (DSHB) as the worldwide distributor of cancer-fighting proteins, called monoclonal antibodies, and the specialized cells, called hybridomas, that produce them. The DSHB was moved in 1995 from Johns Hopkins University to the laboratory of Dr. David R. Soll, Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver/Emil Witschi Professor in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of Biological Sciences.

The NCI initiative involves five teams of scientists from around the world targeting approximately 1,500 protein-based features that directly or indirectly are involved in cancer. Soll says that in the war on cancer, what has been missing is a complete repertoire of monoclonal antibodies for diagnostics and therapy against the proteins encoded by the 5,000 genes affecting human cancers. Soll explained that the antibodies will be used to advance basic cancer research, develop new and desperately needed diagnostics, and explore antibody therapy. The antibodies developed and distributed through this NCI initiative will be available to the larger scientific community.

Soll adds that on an international scale, the DSHB has grown in the last 10 years to become one of the best known facilities housed at the UI, with more than 60,000 customers worldwide using the nonprofit bank.

"The impact of the NCI initiative is expected to be quite large, and the new collaboration places the DSHB as the key distributor of both monoclonal antibodies and the immortal hybridoma cell lines that se
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