Relationship between cell lines and cancer research (IHC) - (Aug/27/2013 )

Please correct me if I posted my question in the wrong section.

At my current internship I am going to stain different cell lines (examples: HELAp2, COLO741, etc) with antigens (immunohistochemistry) relating to cancer research (examples p53, MSH-2/6, MLH-1, PMS-2). But I can’t seem to understand the underlying reason why we would want to build a database with those cell lines. The idea is to test lots of different cell lines with those 5 stains and record them into a database. Is it to predict further results with cancer research? Could anybody please point me in some way? I am not getting the complete picture.

Thank you very much in advance.

Regards,

William van Doorn

Don't worry, your question seems to be in the right place.

I suspect that the reason you are doing the staining is to establish a baseline for comparison, so that you can treat these cells and see how the stains change with treatment.

In general, if such information is made accessible to all researchers, it is a very useful resource which others can also compare their results to. 

bob1 on Tue Aug 27 21:54:58 2013 said:

Don't worry, your question seems to be in the right place.

 

I suspect that the reason you are doing the staining is to establish a baseline for comparison, so that you can treat these cells and see how the stains change with treatment.

Those cell lines are cancer cell lines, so I guess to have some sort of database is usefull to look up markers for a specific tumortissue in the future?

Would it theoritically be possible, to let's say: stain those 5 markers on patient Y with unknown disease. Markers A, B and C are positive and D + E are negative. I would look up in the database and find a cell line with the same markers positive and negative. This could suggest that patient Y has that cancer cell line in his body, and possible has cancer type X? 

wptmdoorn on Wed Aug 28 08:22:46 2013 said:

Would it theoritically be possible, to let's say: stain those 5 markers on patient Y with unknown disease. Markers A, B and C are positive and D + E are negative. I would look up in the database and find a cell line with the same markers positive and negative. This could suggest that patient Y has that cancer cell line in his body, and possible has cancer type X? 

No, it doesn't work like that.  Assignment of cell type (and hence cancer type) is largely based on morphology and occasionally expression of certain cell associated markers.  It is more likely that your results would be used to stage a particular cancer from cell type X (i.e. indicate how aggressive it is and how likely it is to metastasize).