Service Project 2: Preservation and Processing of Bronchial Alveolar Lavage fluid (BALf)

Developing new methods of preserving biospecimens and technology to improve biospecimen quality.

Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid is a useful tool to collect cells and soluble components from the lung for the diagnosis of disease, biomarker discovery and for understanding mechanisms of disease.

In most biorepositories BALF specimens are simply placed in -80oC freezers where they frozen in an uncontrolled manner without any cryoprotectant. This method of storage is lethal for the cells and detrimental for the macromolecules and the potential biomarkers. To date there have been no studies conducted with BALF to determine the stability of biomarkers (i.e. quality of the specimens) during these sub-optimal storage conditions.

We hypothesize that sub-optimum storage of BALF specimens is one of the main reasons causing significant changes in the relative proportions of biomarkers in BALF within a sample and thus negating the diagnostic properties of biospecimens. Our preliminary results showed very significant differences between the secondary structures of BALF macromolecules in fresh vs. freeze/thawed samples. Studies are currently underway to identify the BALF proteins that are most susceptible to freezing and drying in order to 1) develop freezing additives to BALF to minimize protein damage and to 2) develop desiccation-based storage techniques to eliminate the requirement for cryopreservation.