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Mesothelioma Tissue Banks Offer Researchers a Place to Turn for Pathology Data and Tissue Samples

Thursday, October 29, 2009

by Nancy Meredith
Mesothelioma, often referred to as an orphan disease due to the minimal amount of research dedicated to finding a cure, now has several tissue banks and data warehouses for researchers to access when studying the disease. These databases and biospeciman registries are designed and offered to advance the knowledge and understanding of mesothelioma and to help scientists find a cure for the disease.

Shared Pathology Informatics Network (SPIN)
Funded in 2001 by the National Cancer Institute, SPIN was started in conjunction with "Healthy People 2010." Healthy People 2010 is a set of health objectives and priorities established by the Department of Health and Human Services for the United States to achieve over the first decade of the new century. The Shared Pathology Informatics Network is related to the priority area of cancer.

The objective of SPIN is to use "state-of-the-art informatics techniques to establish an Internet-based virtual database that will allow investigators to locate appropriate human tissue specimens for their research." SPIN provides researchers access to data of archived tissue specimens stored at various institutions. The institutions maintaining the data and the tissue banks are able to continue to maintain local control of the data.

Harvard, UCLA, Indiana University and the University of Pittsburgh all utilized the software to forward their research for all types of cancer. The need for tools such as SPIN has become more important as the use of tissues, diagnostic specimens, and their related clinical data in biomedical research has grown.

In a February 2006 assessment of the success of SPIN researchers concluded that pre-existing archives in pathology departments are "adequate sources of tissue blocks that can be used in many types of research efforts. This assessment shows that individual institutions can utilize electronic data to search for archival tissues which are of interest to researchers."

The National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank (NMVB)
The National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank (NMVB) is provided through a collaborative effort of the Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Epidemiology, and Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh, and is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This virtual bank links data associated with specimens collected and stored at different institutions across the United States. The NMVB provides real-time access to all information including demographic, epidemiologic, pathologic, genotype, and follow-up data associated with biospecimens.

NMVB has close to 1,000 biospecimens including: paraffin embedded tissue, fresh frozen tissue, and developed mesothelioma tissue microarrays (TMAs) with associated multimodal data annotation. The NMVB staff, as well as physicians and researchers, recognize that progress in mesothelioma clinical research can only be achieved through access to high-quality tissue that is associated with data.

The data is available to all researchers, and can be queried by: age at diagnosis, work history, cancer history, genotype, and staging, among other areas. The search is available at no cost to all researchers whether academic or commercial, as well as US-based or foreign.

The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
M.D. Anderson, one of the leading mesothelioma treatment centers in the United States, maintains a mesothelioma tissue bank. Every patient that is treated for mesothelioma is asked to donate tissue and blood specimens in the name of research.

The data will be used in ongoing research testing chemotherapies. M.D. Anderson uses the samples in their database, from 89 patients, as well as obtaining sample from outside laboratories.

Labels: Featured Story

posted by Nancy Meredith at 7:00 AM
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