Continuation and Expansion of the National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank for Translational Research (U24) - 2021

Summary: The National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank (NMVB) network consents patients to provide biospecimens (blood products and tissue) together with demographic data, occupational history and clinical data (stage, treatment and survival information) to the mesothelioma research community. In addition, protein biomarkers, genomic and imaging data are also collected by researchers and shared for future studies. The University of Pittsburgh is the coordinating site for the NMVB protocol, which is also in place at four partnering sites, New York University, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Maryland and University of Pennsylvania. Our specific aims are to: 1) Continue to serve the mesothelioma cancer research community by collecting and distributing tissue, blood and the aforementioned data as well as increasing the NMVB cohort to 2200 patients. We will continue to document and continually evaluate the usefulness of the NMVB to the scientific community and measure its impact in collaboration with the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation; 2) Expand the network to the Baylor College of Medicine which increases both the geographic and racial diversity of the NMVB cohort. We will also promote our mesothelioma data model nationally and internationally to encourage linkage to other registries; and 3) Our continued innovation aim is to automate annotation of biospecimens through extraction of clinical, outcomes, and pathology data from electronic health records and cancer registry systems through a cost-effective open source tool for Research Electronic Data Capture or REDCap. We will deploy and implement scalable, cost-effective tools to maximize the effectiveness of the data extraction process across collaborating sites which will allow linkage to other national and international tissue and data sharing networks.