With gratitude and pride in this community, I write with the bittersweet message that my role will soon be transitioning from oversight of PSOM’s biomedical research core facilities, and that my work as Associate Dean will be shifting to focus primarily on PSOM’s Research Integration initiatives. This move was not an easy decision, but this time of reconnection and renewal is an opportune moment to further develop research networks and resources within and beyond our School.

For the past seven years, I have been honored to support the stellar scientific endeavors of the PSOM core facilities community. In partnership with core directors, staff, users, PMACS, and our dedicated committee, I am incredibly proud of the work we have achieved, and the progress we have made. Together, we have seen the development of new core facilities and the thoughtful reorganization of others. We spent the time and effort to build a robust iLab management system. We implemented quarterly core directors meetings, now led by your own meeting chair. We hosted fantastic Cores Day events each year – both in person and virtually – and created a suite of outreach and promotional materials highlighted on our recently revamped website. We facilitated the funding of equipment, symposia, and other resources, to allow your teams to achieve new levels of scientific excellence. Most recently, we supported each other through an extraordinarily challenging COVID period, and hopefully into brighter days ahead.

I thank you all for your unwavering partnership, and look forward to many years of scientific collaboration.

Thank you,

Lou

Yale

Communication and developing relationships are important to strengthen and promote unity among PSOM Cores. To keep us connected, especially during the pandemic, we had our first “You Slide” presentations at the last Core Director’s Meeting in December 2021. Andrea Stout (Director of the CDB Microscopy Core Facility), Tapan Ganguly (Director of the Penn Genomic Analysis Core Facility, Cell Center Services), and Chris Petucci (Director of the Penn Metabolomics Core) presented single PowerPoint slides with pictures and text summarizing their education, career path, interests, and hobbies. These presentations enabled us to have a more personable meeting and get to know each other better.

My name is Luca Musante and I took over the position of Director of the Extracellular Vesicle Core Facility in the School of Veterinary Medicine on the 1^st of February.

Core Facilities Spotlight: Neurobehavior Testing Core Facility

For more information, please visit our page on the ITMAT website or contact the core director W. Timothy O’Brien PhD: obrienw@pennmedicine.upenn.edu

Core Facilities Spotlight: OCRC Tumor BioTrust Collection

More info about the core and pricing can be found at: https://www.med.upenn.edu/OCRCBioTrust/

Molecular Therapy (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymthe.2019.11.028.

Cancers 2019, 11, 1805; doi:10.3390/cancers11111805.

Shoumei Bai, Wanhong Zhu, Lan Coffman, Anda Vlad, Lauren E. Schwartz, Esther Elishaev, Ronny Drapkin and Ronald J Buckanovich

Cancers 2019, 11, 1710; doi:10.3390/cancers11111710.

Ehay Jung, Technical Director

Smilow CTR 08-191A

3400 Civic Center Blvd

Philadelphia, PA 19104

Phone: 215-746-5137

E-mail: TBCrequests@pennmedicine.upenn.edu

Core Facilities Spotlight: Viral / Molecular High Density Sequencing Core Facility

The Viral/Molecular High Density Sequencing (VMHDS) Core is a PSOM registered core facility that offers several sophisticated assays on a fee-for-service basis.

We have collaborated with numerous research institutions and corporations globally to study patterns of viral vector integration in gene therapy patient specimens to assess longitudinal performance of gene therapy products. Technologies studied include lentiviral, gammaretroviral and adeno-associated viral vectors. Our service includes a wet side workup of patient DNA samples, high throughput sequencing and generation of a patient analysis report. We create custom analysis and reports based on the specific needs of each collaborator. We are also working with several research groups to study HIV integration site distributions in patient specimens and helping to assess the relationship of integration target site selection and latency.

To help researchers who are developing therapies based on targeted nuclease cleavage, we offer the iGuide assay which quantifies off-target cleavage.

Our core also supports whole genome sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We are sequencing patient specimens in and around the Greater Philadelphia area to study the evolution of strains over time and to document the variants driving the waves in this region. Our dashboard site can be found here: https://microb120.med.upenn.edu/data/SARS-CoV-2

Some recent publications highlighting our research assays:

Marques, AD et al.

mBio. 2022 Feb 8;e0378821.

Magnani, A et al.

Nat Med. 2022 Jan;28(1):71-80.

Antigen-driven clonal selection shapes the persistence of HIV-1-infected CD4+ T cells in vivo.

Simonetti, FR et al.

J Clin Invest. 2021 Feb 1;131(3):e145254.

Nguyen, GN et al.

Nat Biotechnol. 2021 Jan;39(1):47-55.

iGUIDE: an improved pipeline for analyzing CRISPR cleavage specificity.

Nobles, CL et al.

Genome Biol. 2019 Jan 17;20(1):14.

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