Biospecimen procurement and tissue microarray manufacture for the CHTN

The University of Virginia (UVA) currently supports the “adult” Mid-Atlantic Division of the Cooperative Human Tissue Network (CHTN), offering high quality human tissue and biofluid specimens procured, stored and shipped under optimized standard operating procedures. A team of consent staff recruit subjects at UVA clinics, with the consent including provisions for genetic sequencing and data sharing as well as donating tissue, blood and bone marrow samples. Staffing, procedures & infrastructure are in place to minimize procurement times and tissue samples are quality controlled by histologic examination by Board- certified Pathologists. Procured tissue specimens are made available in fresh-frozen, chemically-fixed, paraffin-embedded and viable form. UVA is joined by two satellite donor sites to increase geographic and racial/ethnic diversity: the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), which has a significantly higher percentage of African-American patients than UVA, and by the University of New Mexico (UNM), which has a significantly higher percentage of Hispanic patients than UVA. We propose to continue procurement at these 3 sites for the next funding period. As one of the few current CHTN divisions able to procure fresh and frozen samples of prostate cancer, we propose to continue to offer this precious resource to CHTN investigators. We also propose to continue our focus on constructing tissue microarrays (TMAs) for the CHTN, to help supplement the traditional strengths of the CHTN (prospective customizable procurement of tissue) with larger cohorts of specimens in TMA format, with more rich annotation of clinical data. Our ability to provide annotated data is enhanced by an established tumor registry. We will also continue to provide specimens from a large legacy collection of lung cancer biospecimens from the Lung Cancer Biospecimen Resource Network. We will provide histology guided-macrodissection services to create value-added target tissue enrichment and histologic quality control and will provide viable freezing of dissociated tissue and isolated white blood cells, as well as DNA/RNA isolation from tissue specimens. To support new areas of research, we will 1) create digital pathology scans of all tissues procured for research purposes at UVA for a repository of well-annotated histology images for image analysis and machine learning projects and 2) will create a repository of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with cancer-causing germline mutations.