Institutional Profile: The Emory Biomarker Service Center

The Emory Biomarker Service Center (EBSC) provides state-of-the-art analytical technologies to impact biomarker discovery, development and clinical translation of biomarker research in a spectrum of disease and therapeutic areas. EBSC technologies are primarily concentrated in medical genomics, microarray expression profiling and data analysis. The EBSC provides state-of-the-art services in nucleic acid extraction, genomic sequencing, custom and whole-genome genotyping, cytosine–phosphate–guanine dinucleotide (CpG) methylation, mRNA and miRNA expression analyses. The EBSC typically processes tens of thousands of samples per year, utilizing instrumentation and automation from Tecan, Qiagen, Applied Biosystems, Eppendorf and Beckman Coulter, which are supported by the Thermofisher Nautilus Laboratory Information Management System data-management architecture. The EBSC provides services and platforms for biomarker profiling of fresh, frozen or formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues using both Affymetrix, Inc. and Illumina, Inc. platforms. It provides quality-control and data analysis in a high-throughput manner in a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments certified laboratory. Bioinformatics support is provided to users by a team of analysts using a variety of standard and custom software tools.