Amy Brock, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, was recently named a 2019 Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) Innovation Award Finalist.
She advanced in the competition with her presentation titled “Lineage-Resolved Molecular and Functional Analyses of Cancer Cell Populations.” The research she described explains an innovative barcoding technology that allows her to track individual tumor cells by tagging them with a unique nucleic acid that is then expressed in that cell’s progeny. The purpose of the tagging is learn more about individual tumor cells to find out why certain therapies stop working and to prevent treatment resistance. The technology, called Capture Lineages by Barcode-Enabled Recombinant Transcription, or COLBERT for short, is described further in this ACS Synthetic Biology paper.
The 2019 SLAS International Conference & Exhibition took place in Washington, D.C. in early February. SLAS is a global community of scientists, technologists, researchers, academics, and data informatics professionals. The organization provides relevant education, information, innovation, and access to the world’s largest network of professionals focused on leveraging technology for scientific advancement.
