We are outfitting a new Internet-connected work room to serve our local and distant team members. To this end, out of our own pockets, we have already spent:

$1,933.09 - computers
$557.96 - monitors
$341.67 - support services
$106.24 - encryption software

We are good stewards of our resources. To keep costs down, we go open-source when we can, and currently use:

$0 - R Project for Statistical Computing Software
$0 - PSPP Statistical Analysis Software
$0 - TeamViewer 11 Personal Edition

For our next investment, we asked ourselves, what would be the biggest game changers in terms of increasing our efficiency? The answers were obvious. First, Internet-connected digital microscopy equipment would provide us with new capabilities. Second, subscriptions to Internet-based encrypted cloud storage and image-editing software would enhance our ability to collaborate.

Therefore, we request your help with purchasing a digital trinocular pathology microscope, DropBox Pro, and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Additional Information

How do we know that our project is feasible? We know it because we have already completed a successful pilot study under the mentorship of our division chief in urologic pathology, the results of which have been accepted as an abstract at this year's United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology meeting in Seattle, WA.

For those of you interested in the technical details, here is the citation and the text of the abstract:

Mata, DA, et al. Stathmin1 is a sensitive and specific biomarker for high grade urothelial carcinomas. United States & Canadian Academy of Pathology Annual Meeting. 2016.

Background: Stathmin 1 (STMN1), a microtubule destabilizing protein, regulates cytoskeletal dynamics, cell cycle progression, mitosis, and cell migration, and is influenced by p53, p27, and PI3K/Akt pathway activation. STMN1 expression has been shown to be a useful diagnostic biomarker in fallopian tube intraepithelial carcinomas and squamous intraepithelial lesions of the cervix. It is unclear whether STMN1 is useful in the diagnosis of urothelial carcinoma. The goals of this study were to determine if STMN1 can be used to differentiate between (1) urothelial carcinoma in situ (CIS) and benign/reactive/denuded urothelium (BUM); (2) CIS and the “shoulder” of a papillary urothelial carcinoma (PUC); and (3) high grade and low grade PUCs.

Design: One hundred and fourteen biopsies were examined, including 46 BUMs, 25 CISs, 24 LG PUCs, and 19 HG PUCs. All cases were examined by H&E, but scored blindly for STMN1 (absent or scattered basal cells only = negative vs near full to full thickness staining = positive), p53 (wild type vs mutant), CK20 (umbrella or scattered cells = negative vs full thickness = positive), and Ki67 (low vs elevated). Standard binary classification analysis was used to compute the sensitivity and specificity of the markers. Statistical significance was defined as a two-tailed P < 0.05.

Results: Immunohistochemical results are presented in Table 1, and sensitivity and specificity for single or combined biomarkers is presented in Table 2. Based on these results, both STMN1 and p53 appear to be far superior to CK20 for bladder biopsy evaluation.

Conclusion: Although STMN1 and p53 show similar sensitivity for CIS, STMN1 appears to be more specific for CIS and the distinction of LG vs HG PUC. Neither p53 nor STMN1 is very useful for distinguishing CIS and the shoulder of a papillary lesion. In addition to being a useful diagnostic biomarker, these results suggest that STMN1 overexpression in high grade urothelial carcinomas may potentiate aberrant cell proliferation, loss of polarity, and/or migration during early tumorigenesis.

With that out of the way, we want to make a few other points. First, the equipment that we will purchase if our experiment.com campaign is successful will last a lifetime. At any one time, our group is working on one of a dozen projects, and the microscope, online storage space, and cloud-based image-editing software will contribute to all of them. In the short term, after validating our battery of immunohistochemical markers for improving the diagnosis of bladder cancer, we plan to study their associations with disease outcome and response to therapy using epidemiological cohort data to which we have access through Harvard Medical School. This really is molecular pathoepidemiology in action.

In the long term, this equipment will also be used for other studies, for example, of prostate, renal, and thyroid cancers; the development of slide-based teaching tools for medical students interested in neuro- and psychopathology; and study of histologic correlates or consequences of specific medical conditions such as hypogonadism. We have already published several articles in these spaces, and encourage you to check them out on our website. If successful, we will proudly acknowledge this experiment.com campaign in all future manuscripts to help get the word out about this great website.