This website provides information on the human mammary cell
(HMEC) resources that have been developed at my laboratory at the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory,
As part of my ongoing research program since 1976, my laboratory has developed and stored frozen a variety of normal, benign, tumor-derived, and in vitro transformed cultures of HMEC. In the interest of facilitating scientific investigations using HMEC, our laboratory makes these cells available to other researchers. The cell types available, and details about their origins and characterization, can be found in "Human Mammary Cell Types Available for Distribution" and in the sections referred to under "Review of the HMEC Culture System". A brief summary of our results and current models of how these HMEC undergo senescence and overcome senescence to become immortal can be found in "Brief History".
Please keep in mind
the limits of what we can provide:
We are not a commercial or official cell bank, and we receive only minor financial support for this service.
We distribute only the human cell resources developed in our laboratory; we do not distribute tumor cell lines.
I'm available for consultation about use of our HMEC resources, but not for generic mammary cell culture questions, or where to find reagents.
I've posted all this information on the Internet to relieve me of needing to answer many different researchers' technical and scientific questions. Please check this site first to see if the answers to your questions are contained within before contacting me.
If you would like to obtain HMEC from us, you are welcome to contact me for assistance in determining which cells might be the most appropriate for addressing your scientific questions. A first contact by email is preferred; further discussions by phone may follow.
To obtain cells, you will be asked to:
1) Send a brief (1 page) letter describing your planned experiments, and indicating that (1) you will keep me informed of results or major changes in planned experiments; (2) you will not give the cells to others without my permission.
2) Contact our Technology Transfer Department
to obtain the
3) Provide in your letter a FedEx number or equivalent to charge the costs of shipping the cells. Please be sure to include a full FedEx shipping address, including telephone number.
4) For shipments outside the
5) I would also welcome receiving any of your papers relevant to the proposed research that you could send via the internet. I can be reached as follows:
Martha Stampfer
Email: mrstampfer@lbl.gov
Phone-office: 510 486-7273
Phone-lab: 510 486-4558
Human Mammary Cell Types
Available for Distribution
Brief History and Schematic Charts
Review of the Human Mammary Epithelial Cell (HMEC) Culture System
(last revised 01/03)
Additional Websites of interest for mammary gland biology:
Biology of the Mammary Gland provided by the National Institute of Health
University of Michigan Human Breast Cell Tissue Bank and Data Base
This web site was developed with support
from the Department of Defense.