Nico Corporation has awarded Dr. Rohan Ramakrishna a one-year, $30,000 grant to study how the automated handling of glioma specimens affects the quality of the tissue to be analyzed. Dr. Ramakrishna, Co-Director of the Rhodes Center for Glioblastoma at NewYork-Presbyterian, Director of the Brain Metastasis Program at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Chief of Neurological Surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist, will use NICO’s tissue preservation system to dissociate and preserve the tissue in the operating room for analysis.
“The future of glioma treatment lies in translational research,” says Dr. Ramakrishna. “Extracting and preserving high-quality biospecimens in a standard, automated procedure may allow us to improve the precision of our analysis and help us better tailor treatments to an individual based on that patient’s tumor. With this technology, we aim to understand how tissue processing in the pre-analytic phase affects downstream tissue analyses. Given that NICO's tissue preservation system standardizes tissue collection in a manner that benefits tissue viability, we may see improvements in assays that rely on cell viability relative to the current operating room workflow.”
Dr. Ramakrishna is collaborating with Dr. Howard Fine in Neuro-oncology and Dr. Olivier Elemento of the Englander institute of Precision Medicine. The team will study whether tissue processing in the operating room affects cell culture results, measures of clonality and heterogeneity, and even tissue immune infiltrates.
The investigation builds on a recent multi-institutional NIH UO1 award funding a study of how biospecimen handling affects measure of tumor methylation. Dr Ramakrishna is co-investigator on that study, in which he has partnered with investigators at the University of Washington and Houston Methodist Neuroscience Institute.
