Charleston Regional Development Alliance

Berkeley, Charleston & Dorchester Counties

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MUSC cytopathology center one of top four in the nation

Dec. 1, 2003
Charleston Regional Business Journal
By Sarah G. McC. Moďse
The Medical University of South Carolina’s Center for Quality Improvement in Cytopathology has been honored as an American Society of Cytopathology Center of Excellence. Part of the College of Health Professions, the staff conducts research in development of laboratory tests to identify people at risk for a variety of cancers and educates students in the field of cancer diagnostics.

There are 3,200 cytopathology labs, or cancer prevention labs, around the country. From those thousands, four were chosen for the distinction for their research, clinical trials and education: Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, MUSC and the University of Vermont.

“We’re very pleased,” says Dr. E. Blair Holladay, director of the MUSC cytopathology center. “There’s going to be increased visibility for what we’re doing here. A lot of companies are going to ferret us out to help them determine if they’ve got good data, trials, instrumentation and good clinical assays… if they do have a good test for preventing cancer.”

South Carolina’s disproportionately high cancer rates contribute to the center’s success in contracting with biotech companies from across the country. “It’s a huge industry because biotechnology companies need patients. They have to form alliances with hospitals so that we can help them conduct their studies,” explains Holladay.

Biotech firms engage centers to conduct clinical research, which measures the value of their tests for early detection of cancer. The center, working with a consortium of a dozen South Carolina hospitals, is able to very quickly amass a large number of patients’ specimens needed for the clinical research studies.

The 12 major facilities send specimens to Charleston or enroll patients in research trials. Researchers then conduct the DNA testing at the center to determine if the patient is at risk for a type of cancer that a particular company is studying.

“They are knocking down our door to do this work,” says Holladay. “It’s allowed us to build our portfolio, and we’ve become fairly well recognized in the country as being the cutting edge research facility.”

Most of the center’s grant work and clinical research helps companies develop and move technologies to the Food and Drug Administration and marketplace as quickly as possible, so that patients can benefit before they actually develop cancer.

“Our interest is predominately to prevent the disease from ever occurring,” Holladay says. “With early detection, doctors can treat the affected area by surgery or chemo prevention, so that it doesn’t develop into cancer and spread to the brain or the lungs. Patients here are actually some of the first patients in the nation to be determined if they have these precancerous genes,” he adds.

MUSC’s Center for Quality Improvement in Cytopathology also has an educational arm. Whenever the staff commits to a research project (20 to 25 are undertaken per year), their state-of-the-art information is available to the university’s students as well. Students get real time experience on how the research works, how to make mistakes and how to fix them.

According to Holladay, employers across the nation are very excited by the prospect of bringing these techniques to their laboratories to make them more competitive.

“Everybody wins,” he says. “The biotech company wins. The university wins. Obviously our center wins. But most importantly, the patient wins.”
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