The Common Facilities (CF) operates and maintains support services like X-ray developing machine, ultra-pure water purification system, radioactive handling room for 32P and 125I, bacterial culture hoods, ice making machines and cold room facility to different research groups. In addition, maintenance of all the autoclaves and ovens belonging to different research groups is handled by the CF technicians.

All the major equipment under common facility is covered under annual maintenance contract in order to provide safe, sustainable, efficient and reliable facilities.

The ACTREC Biorepository is the custodian of stored biological samples that can be shared, under a tightly regulated and strictly monitored mechanism, with researchers having approved projects that aim to study the biology of cancer, find biomarkers for a more refined molecular classification, or for targeted therapy. In all, tissue samples from 630 cases were accrued in the Biorepository during 2017. As always the majority were head and neck tumors, followed by breast tumors. Other tumor types included neurological, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, gynecological, etc.

This year, the collection of bio specimens was extended to the Breast OPD wherein core biopsies are now being cryo preserved for future research; this is in addition to collection from the OTs, Frozen room and Surgical Pathology. Cryopreserved tissue samples (470) were provided to eight Principal Investigators with approved projects under various protocols at the Tata Memorial Centre. In the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) project, gingivo buccal mucosa tumour and blood samples were collected from 30 patients accrued this year, and their extracted genomic DNA samples were sent to NIBMG, Kalyani for whole genome scan and sequence capture-based flow cell sequencing.

The Biorepository itself initiated a project on quality monitoring of in-house cryo preserved tissues. The OIC contributed her Pathology expertise involving the evaluation of Hematoxylin & Eosin as well as immunohistochemistry slides to eight ACTREC projects.

The Bioinformatics facility of ACTREC provides infrastructural and technical support to scientists, clinicians and research scholars of the Centre to fulfil the bioinformatics requirements of their on-going research projects. Scientists of the Centre also use the facility’s infrastructure to explore microarray, next generation sequence data analysis, database development, molecular modelling and data mining for their on-going projects.

This facility receives strong funding support from DBT and is established as a BTIS-net centre of this region. It is well equipped with one nVIDIA Tesla GPU workstation, 5 workstations, 1 webserver and seven PCs. The facility also focuses on database development such as Histome: the human infobase; this database is presently being updated. In the domain of gene expression studies, projects related to TGCA database mining and analysis are under progress. In silico molecular modelling, dynamics and protein-protein interactions have been performed using BARC’s supercomputing facility.

The facility hosted a national 28th BTISnet Coordinators Meeting on 3rd and 4th February 2017. The facility also organized its annual 2-day Workshop on ‘Basics of Bioinformatics’ targeting college teachers and research scholars of institutions in the Mumbai and neighboring areas on 2nd and 3rd March 2017. The facility staff also provided training to six trainees during the year, three for Bachelor’s/ Master’s dissertation and three for experience.

The Anti-Cancer Drug Screening Facility (ACDSF) at ACTREC supports the efforts of anti-cancer drug development in India, with in vitro and in vivo anti-cancer drug screening assays that have been developed in-house. ACDSF has 53 human tumor cell lines, 10 murine tumor models and 38 xenograft models for carrying out drug screening. During 2017, 1345 compounds were received from 161 clients including eight corporate R&D organizations from 13 states across India. In all, 1287 compounds were tested for their in vitro activity and 58 compounds were examined for MTD (n=14) and in vivo efficacy assays (n=44).

Two new xenografts namely KG-1 (leukemia) and HCC1954 (breast cancer) were developed during the report year. The facility has successfully completed XII-plan CSIR funded project ‘Affordable cancer therapeutics’ in collaboration with IICT, Hyderabad (2012-17). Of the second set of 300 compounds, 11 compounds were found to be active against four cancer cell lines (Hep-G2, HT-29, SCC-29B and PLC-Prf-5).

Temporary Suspension of Testing Services

Three of these compounds that were most active against oral cancer spheroids (CSC) were further tested for their in vivo efficacy against oral cancer xenograft AW13516. Only one of these (AKL-JA) was found to be strongly active against the AW13516 xenograft. Corroborative evidence was obtained through PET-CT imaging of tumor bearing animals and histopathology of tumor sections.