Tissue Procurement Facility & Biospecimen

ABSTRACT: TISSUE PROCUREMENT FACILITY SHARED RESOURCE The Tissue Procurement Facility (TPF) is the main conduit for access to protocol driven tissue-based research. As part of the 2019 strategic plan, this SR was expanded and reorganized to provide additional services and with a more robust pipeline for faculty conducting this type of clinical research. The expansion of this resource led to enhanced services including: • More timely fresh tissue collection. TPF has developed a pipeline to collect fresh tissue for next-generation research focusing on single-cell and chip sequencing. The fresh tissue infrastructure requires significant collaboration between Surgical Pathology, Anatomic Pathology, TPF, and Clinical Protocol and Data Management (CPDM). For scRNA sequencing TPF has added an additional workflow to facilitate this methodology. • Tissue dissociation. TPF is equipped for single-cell dissociation to process tissue to single-cell for investigators that do not have the technology to do so and/or are investigating more robust experiments. • Ultrapure plasma processing. Ultra highspeed plasma purification for downstream cfDNA analysis. Ultrapure plasma will produce a significantly cleaner signal-to-noise ratio for investigators looking at cfDNA. TPFis led by an experienced faculty and staff. Dr. Calhoun is Director of Surgical Pathology and Anatomical Pathology at UNC and serves as Pathology Director. He works closely with the surgical liaison, co-leader HJ Kim to ensure responsible policies are in place for the procurement of research specimens following guidelines established by the UNC Hospitals. Amy Garratt serves as the Facility Director for the SR and its translational consenting and collection component. This is a well-managed resource with an operating budget of $1.0M. TPF requests $229,718 (21% of the total) for fiscal year 2020. LCCC members were more than 66% of the users in fiscal year 2019, virtually all other users were performing cancer research. The Facility procured, and distributed 46,091 specimens to support 154 different investigator-initiated studies.