This facility focusses on preclinical animal imaging and research on radiopharmaceuticals. The diagnostic radionuclides - technetium-99m and fluorine-18 complexes are being evaluated for their utility in imaging and monitoring cancer xenografts in mouse models. In 2017, the facility supported 17 preclinical PET, SPECT and CT imaging studies on rodents for basic and translational research projects from ACTREC, other DAE units, academic institutes and pharmaceutical industries.

A majority of the studies were proof-of-concept studies, normal tracer uptake studies and in vivo tumor uptake studies - some involving validation of liver and brain xenograft and orthotopic models. The facility also designs imaging protocols for ex vivo bone imaging and analysis utilizing high resolution microCT, development of animal models, data quantitation, and analysis. During 2017, the facility conducted a major imaging study for the pharmaceutical industry. The facility also runs a complete cancer care program for the diagnosis and treatment of pet animals suffering from spontaneous cancer through its animal oncology clinic. During 2017, 122 referral cases underwent major/ minor surgeries, single or combination drug chemotherapy, radiation therapy or a combination of these, based on clinical requirement.

The animal cancer biorepository maintains biological material (blood, fresh-frozen/ formalin-fixed/ FFPE tissues) obtained during diagnosis and treatment, and utilizes them for research on comparative aspects of animal and human cancers. The senior faculty organized a CME on ‘Preclinical imaging and drug discovery’ at ACTREC from 20th to 22nd September 2017. The facility accepted six trainees during the year – one for Bachelor’s and four for Master’s dissertation, one for research experience, and one observer. Orientation tours of the facility were conducted during the year for visiting students and other visitors.

The Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) facility at ACTREC has a HiSeq 1500 from Illumina and an Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine from Thermofisher. The machines were used by in house scientists as well as those from BARC and IISER, Pune during 2017.

Transcriptome analysis was carried out on the Hiseq 1500 to understand the expression of genes in oral cancer cell lines, in human samples exposed to low dose radiation, and in medullary thyroid cancer.

Exome sequencing was carried out to profile mutations in individuals exposed to radiation, for de novo sequencing of an insect exome, and to find differences in the penetrance and disease aggression of germline mutations in inherited cancers. After DNA/ RNA sample quality checks, exome and transcriptome libraries for 55 samples were prepared in house and sequenced on the HiSeq 1500. Good quality data was obtained and downstream bioinformatics analysis was done with open resource tools by the users.

Ion Torrent PGM libraries for targeted resequencing of BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes were prepared in 108 cases of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome. Pathogenic mutations were identified in 45 families.

The Mass Spectrometry facility at ACTREC houses two state-of-the-art mass spectrometry platforms connected to high performance liquid chromatographic systems – one is the Nano-LC (ABSCIEX, Eksigent)-ESI-Q-TOF (ABSCIEX, Triple TOF 5600 plus), and the second one is MALDI-TOF/TOF (Bruker Daltonics, Ultraflex II) equipped with an Agilent 1200 series micro LC system and a spotter (Bruker Daltonics, Proteineer).

After achieving skill and experience of various trials and trouble shooting of sample preparation, sample purification, method development techniques, data analysis parameter settings on the nanoLC-ESI-Q-TOF, the Mass Spectrometry team successfully carried out sample analysis and began accepting samples for study from users. Besides profiling 258 complex protein mixtures, 107 samples were analyzed for the identification of enriched proteins.

The team also successfully performed label free quantification (SWATH analysis) of 90 complex protein samples. Further, 14 samples were analyzed for i-TRAQ label quantification and 20 samples for PTM determination. Demonstration of MALDI TOF-TOF was conducted as and when required for visiting faculty and students.