History
Owing to its uniqueness, there was enormous interest in the scientific and medical community with regard to potential applications for many diseases. In addition to offering a full range of microarray analyses for prostate cancer researchers, the facility has established strong collaborations with investigators in the Forestry, Fisheries, Infectious Diseases and the Environmental research communities. In 2001, it was designated as the Genome British Columbia Microarray Platform, under the direction of its founding scientist, Dr. Colleen Nelson. The facility has since served national large-scale genomic projects requiring high capability, expertise and training capacity for the research community. Today, the Laboratory for Advanced Genome Analysis (previoulsy "the Microarray Facility") is a multiplatform innovation centre, at the Vancouver Prostate Centre (VPC), that integrates academic research and service provider functions under the leadership of Dr. Colin Collins. Dr. Collins highly collaborative academic research unit functions as an incubator for the development and translation of new innovations, technologies, bioinformatic tools, and pipelines to the service unit ensuring state of the art solutions to clients. This structure enables the management of research projects from experimental design to analysis and interpretation of data as well as support for grant applications and publications. The LAGA provides open fee-for-service access as a core facility (intra-institutional services to its researchers) and as regional, national and international facility (inter-institutional services).
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The
microarray technology group was set up at the Prostate Centre
in 1999 by Dr. Colleen Nelson. At the time of its inception,
the facility was the first in British Columbia and only the
second of its kind in Canada. Using this microarray approach,
the goal was to identify the genes that are critical for the
development and progression of prostate and other cancers. With
information provided by this cutting-edge technology, new diagnostic
and treatment protocols could be designed which are tailored
for the cancers of individual patients.