Phase 1 Clinical Trials Unit – announcement by Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at Auckland University (Auckland DHB)
- The new Auckland unit will boost New Zealanders’ access to cancer drugs in clinical trials
- How can NZ’ers get access to new cancer drugs?
Pharmaceutical Industry-associated molecular profiling platforms
(Pre)-Clinical trials to discover, monitor or match a drug treatment to a cancer patient
Use of Human Tissue, Cell Lines, Organoids and Other Cell or Tissue Models in Research
Over the past decade the use of human tissue in research, and particularly the use of organoids and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to generate powerful new cell and tissue models, has greatly increased worldwide, and this to some extent is now replacing the use of animal models and animal tissues in biomedical research. This has the benefit of reducing the number of animals used in research. Moreover, human tissues are much more able to accurately represent the human disease state, and therefore can be used to directly investigate responses to treatment or other investigations, rather than drawing inferences from animal models. Prior to the last decade, the relative paucity in the use of human tissues was due to relatively limited access to human tissues, which was in part because the technologies and systems were not yet optimized, and because methods of appropriate storage and the techniques for analysis of stored human tissue were less well developed. Now these limitations are less of a challenge. It is now evident that every medical research institution or university must employ cell and tissue research to keep abreast of current biomedical research trends, and the expectations of modern biomedical research now mean that research work including human tissue analysis results in higher quality and higher impact publications. However, these technologies also raise ethical issues, as well as custodianship concerns associated with holding tissue and data from a person, sometimes after the person concerned has passed away. A recent presentation about the potential benefits and the concerns associated with collaborative tissue networking was given at the University of Otago Grand Round by Prof Mike Eccles (Watch on YouTube).