Biospecimens and Patient Registry

ABSTRACT ? Core B The goal of the Biospecimens and Patient Registry Core is to provide investigators in the Ovarian SPORE high quality patient data, DNA, RNA, blood products, and tissues (normal and malignant) from consented patients with ovarian, fallopian tube, or primary peritoneal carcinoma and to make these resources available for future studies. The Mayo Clinic has a strong tradition of ethically sound support of research that links tissue acquisition and patient data records. Paraffin embedded tissues, histological slides, and associated patient charts from surgeries performed since the first decade of the 1900's are maintained in Mayo's Tissue Registry and the Mayo Archives. Today, the Pathology Research Core (PRC) of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center is a resource of expertise, collaborative support, and service for immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridization, tissue microarray construction, and digital imaging. Similarly, the Biospecimens Accessioning and Processing (BAP) core is the primary site of accessioning and standardized processing of blood and frozen tissue collected explicitly for research from all three Mayo sites. The Cytogenetics Core has expertise in establishing, validating, and scoring fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) studies. Core B will be integrated with these existing tissue-oriented Cancer Center shared resources and other scientific Cores of this SPORE to provide a coordinated, centralized, dedicated program for standardized collection, accessioning, processing, morphogenic classification and evaluation of biospecimens and patient data from fully consented ovarian cancer patients. Thorough clinical annotation is required to maximize the potential use of tissue specimens in translational research; therefore, risk factor questionnaires, clinical records, and pathology review are incorporated into the Core. Research services, including pathologic review of tumor histology, tumor sectioning and quality control, blood processing, construction of tissue microarrays (TMAs), immunohistochemistry (IHC), and FISH will be provided to SPORE investigators. The Core will be closely coordinated with the Biostatistics Core to provide seamless linkage of clinical annotation with research specimens for data management and analyses. In the first five years of funding, the Core distributed nearly 4000 ovarian tumor tissues, 342 TMA slides, and over 5400 germline DNA samples. Under the direction of the Administrative Core, the Biospecimens and Patient Registry Core will continue to make biospecimens collected for this SPORE available to SPORE investigators and the ovarian cancer research community at large in order to stimulate translational research with the goal of reducing the burden of ovarian cancer.