Genomics Core Facility

The University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center (UCCCC) Genomics Core Facility (GCF) facilitate investigators’ genomic analysis by providing access to cutting-edge genomic methods and technologies in a cost-effective manner for University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center (UCCCC) investigators. Understanding the genomic landscape of cancer and model systems is a critical component of modern basic, translational, clinical, and large-scale cohort-based cancer research, and a rapidly evolving field. In the current CCSG cycle (2018-2022), GCF supported 95 unique UCCCC members, with 227 federally funded peer-reviewed grants and 200 peer reviewed publications (53% in journals with impact factor > 10). The GCF leadership recognizes the value of developing, improving and evaluating new and existing techniques, assays and/or reagents to ensure that UCCCC faculty have access to the latest genomics capabilities. Consequently, the GCF has had rapid access to the latest available Illumina sequencer (installed within one year of introduction by Illumina). Planned improvements for GCF are to 1) Implement technology that will enable high-plex in situ analysis platform to provide spatial multiomics with formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) and fresh frozen (FF) tissue samples at cellular and subcellular resolution; and 2) Implementation of NovaSEQ-X (delivered March 2023) for higher throughput generation of very long reads of sequence data per template and provides opportunity for genomic structural variant discovery.