Human Tissues Biobank Core Lack of access to validated, high quality human cells and tissues from well-characterized patients is one of the greatest barriers to carrying out human skin disease research. The Human Tissues Biobank Core addresses this unmet critical need, bringing together a set of unique and powerful resources that will allow skin disease investigators at any geographic location, affiliated with any institution, to gain access to highly validated, high quality human tissues with the goal of enabling and supporting high-quality translational human skin disease research. The Biobank Core allows access to 23,000 well characterized patients, their medical records, their genotyping results and the ability to call these patients back for further studies. Access is also provided to over 1.5 million banked pathologic specimens with the ability to access medical records with proper IRB approval. Living patients and pathologic specimens are both searchable by diagnosis and skin diseases are well represented. The Core also offers access to freshly excised human facial skin, abdominal skin and neonatal foreskin and to viable populations of purified cells obtained from human skin. Lastly, the core offers immunodeficient NSG mice grafted with human skin and blood. These mice allow study of living human skin in an accessible animal model and are useful for studying topical drug delivery, signaling in living human skin, T cell trafficking to skin, resident memory T cell generation, graft-versus-host disease and skin fibrosis. The Core also provides IRB protocol drafting and support as well as all services necessary for external investigators to utilize these resources. The Research Community potentially consists of any investigator at any institution who wishes to carry out human cell and tissue-based research. We provide 24 well-developed projects from investigators who wish to utilize Center services. 18 of these investigators would like to use the services of the Human Tissues Biobank Core. 14 of these investigators are from outside institutions, nine have never worked in human skin disease research before and seven have worked primarily in mouse models, with little or no prior work in humans. Eight of these projects are described in detail in this component and other projects are described fully in the two other Resource Core components of the application. In summary, the Biobank Core provides access to highly characterized living patients, banked pathologic specimens, fresh human skin and immunodeficient mice engrafted with human skin and blood. The goal of the Biobank Core is to provide access to high quality human tissues to any researcher at any institution with the goal of accelerating human skin disease research.
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