Genomic Medicine

Infrastructure

IGSP-Pratt Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Development Laboratory

The Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP) and the Pratt School of Engineering will build upon existing collaborations to advance our abilities to achieve the promise of personalized medicine. This partnership will bring together expertise and infrastructure to develop genomic signatures of health and disease resident within genomic medicine, with the cutting-edge engineering and material science programs within the Pratt School of Engineering to develop next-generation point-of-care molecular diagnostic sensor devices. The goal of this enterprise is to deliver state of the art molecular detection opportunities for unmet medical needs in a variety of environments from tertiary care to the developing world.

Central to the success of this partnership is the ability to prepare high-quality, well-characterized test samples and standards and to characterize new point-of-care devices developed for personalized medicine assays. Towards this end, we are establishing a dedicated, centralized Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Development Laboratory. The goals of the lab are:

  1. To prepare, characterize, and distribute high quality genomic “reference” samples to aid in the development, optimization, and evaluation of the novel nucleic acid and protein sensor technologies in support of the Engineering groups;
  2. To work closely with the Engineering groups to prepare and test various derived sample types and processing methods to optimize sample/analyte stability, fractionation and/or derivation methods, depletion of abundant or interfering molecules, pre-assay amplification, and so on; and
  3. To optimize and validate gene and protein expression assays to be used in the characterization of RNA standards and experimental samples, and ultimately in the development and validation of diagnostic assays using the novel sensor technologies.

A central and standardized lab will play the important role of creating validated “calibration” quality test standards to enable the development and optimization of sensor platforms to proceed in parallel with the important assurance that the results obtained on each sensor platform can be reproduced and quantitatively compared.

The lab is equipped with the following:

  • Wide Gel Boxes
  • Gel Imager / UV capable
  • Mastercycler Pro Thermal Cycler
  • 2 Microcentrifuges
  • 1 Large Benchtop Centrifuge
  • 4C and -20C cold storage
  • Thermomixer (with microplate block)
  • Digital Water Bath
  • Agilent Bioanalyzer
  • Nanodrop
  • QIAcube (automated extraction robots)
  • Viia7 Real-Time PCR Instrument
  • 1 or 2 Laminar Flow Hoods robots

Contact:

Marshall Nichols
919.660.7332
marshall.nichols@duke.edu