SLiCE Core

Overview of Services

The "Screening Live Cancer Explants" (SLiCE) Core Facility offers services to test your therapeutics on live, uncultured patient tumor tissue resected at UNC Hospitals.  

Limited vials of tumor tissue from each patient are aliquoted in representative fractions and cryopreserved just after surgery, and vials can be thawed according to need.  Over time, new tumor specimens will become available for testing, while others will be depleted. Established tumor lines are also available for testing on our platform.

We currently engraft brain tumor tissue on organotypic brain slice cultures and ovarian tumor tissue on organotypic mesenteric membrane cultures. Tumors engraft within the intact resident cell populations in each organotypic culture, maximizing tumor survival, maintaining the genetic profile of the parent tumor, and accounting for parent tumor heterogeneity. We can then treat the engrafted tumors with a broad range of therapeutics and analyze on-target tumor kill vs off-target toxicity across several parameters to calculate a summarized Drug Sensitivity Score (DSS) for normalized comparison of diverse therapeutics that accounts for tumor selectivity. Each assay takes four days to complete after the experiment begins.

Leadership

Location and hours of operation

Links and Resources

Please find a description of our Organotypic Brain Slice Culture platform

Please find a description of our Organotypic Mesenteric Membrane Culture platform

Contacts