Rodent Histopathology
Liver from a Noonan syndrome knockout mouse showing diffuse infiltration of mature and immature myelocytes in sinusoids and portal areas.
Director: Thomas Benjamin, PhD
Pathologist: Roderick Bronson, DVM
The Rodent Histopathology Core provides technical, professional, and educational services on rodent pathology. The core offers high quality mouse dissection, tissue processing, histological slide preparation from paraffin embedded and frozen tissues, and expert interpretation of paraffin-embedded, hematoxylin, and eosin stained slides.
The laboratory of Bruce Spiegelman, PhD (DFCI), studied the effects of PPARgamma activation with chemotherapeutic agents in current use for specific cancers. They observed a striking synergy between rosiglitazone and platinum-based drugs in several different cancers both in vitro and using transplantable and chemically induced "spontaneous" tumor models. The effect appeared to be due in part to PPARgamma-mediated down regulation of metallothioneins, proteins that have been shown to be involved in resistance to platinum-based therapy. This suggests combining PPARgamma agonists and platinum-based drugs for the treatment of certain human cancers. Our core worked with the Spiegelman laboratory on their work with PPARgamma. We made histologic slides from tissues from their mice, and reviewed the slides with them to talk about what was going on histologically in their tumors. Their post docs and graduate students received hands-on experience studying the pathology of their mouse disease models, instead of just relying on a report from a pathologist.
