The Faculty of Science was pleased to welcome Dr. Lucy Lee, Dean of Science at UFV. Although she is on sabbatical/administrative leave, she stopped by to talk about her research passion as part of the Faculty of Science Dean’s Seminar Series.
Dr. Lee has devoted over 35 years to fish cell line development. Invitromatics is a new term introduced in 2017 but this field of research dates back 75 years.
Since the early 1940’s, scientists have been able to culture and grow cells outside an organism and maintain them for seemingly indefinite times as “cell lines”. Most famous among the over 100,000 cell lines developed to date, is HeLa, the human cell line derived from a cervical cancer biopsy of an Afro-American woman in the early 1950’s (Henrietta Lacks). These cells were instrumental in the development of key vaccines and cancer medications, technologies for in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, cloning, among many other biotechnological applications. Although most cell lines available to date have been derived from humans, cell lines from many other organisms have been developed including fish.
[box]WATCH Dr. Lee’s Presentation – to be posted soon[/box]
Check out the article in the latest UFV’s student newspaper The Cascade
