Making progress of Japanese Radiological Archives

Abstract

The Japanese Radiobiology Archives (JRA) has been constructed by the leadership of Dr. Shin Saigusa, NIRS, to assemble and catalogue the data of animal experiments conducted for these 30 years in Japan. Recent rapid progress of molecular technologies of small piece of samples has enabled us to add the new findings from the materials of past studies, which are hardly repeated for the financial and ethical reasons. One of successful example is the experiment of mouse thymic lymphomas induced by combined exposure to X-rays with N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea, which are re-examined to establish the mathematical model of combined effects of carcinogenesis (Kawaguchi et al., 2006). The other example is a discovery of human-type-EGFR mutation in rat lung tumors induced by X-rays, which have not been found in rodent lung tumors induced by several chemical carcinogens (Kitahashi et al., 2008).
From these points of views, European Commission and U.S. DOE have sponsored to promote radiobiology archives to collect the data such as mortality, autopsy records, paraffin-embedded tissue, and microscope slides. In the next few years, we are attempting to construct an integrated data network facilitated by internet web. For the time being, images of histopathology is needed to be automatically linked to their data records, by which the researchers can communicate by filling in/out their comments on the web page. This is especially important for the studies using Pu and U, which are not allowed to bring out from the facility. JRA will collaborate with European RA (ERA) and U.S. RA (NRA) to form the worldwide archives.