PROVIDED.The Human Tissue Acquisition and Pathology (HTAP) Resource has been in operation since 1989. Thetissue banking function began at our adult affiliated hospitals and collected a variety of benign and malignanttissues that number in the thousands of specimens. Later additions have increased our expertise in tumorbanking generally, to include prostate cancer (Prostate SPORE), breast cancer (Breast SPORE), andchildhood tumors (Pediatric Oncology Program).The Resource has senior pathologists at all major teaching hospitals, including St. Luke's EpiscopalHospital, Texas Children's Hospital, Ben Taub General Hospital, and the Michael E. DeBakey VeteransAdministration Medical Center. Tissue is procured and snap-frozen in the frozen section area/operatingroom to ensure RNA integrity. All samples are indexed and annotated with clinical and pathologicalparameters. Services (tissue processing, sectioning, special stains, immunohistochemistry) are alsoprovided. In recent years we have created tissue microarrays and produced high-resolution images (Blisssystem) of a virtual slide. We have arrayed over 1700 patients with over 12,000 cores. Ourimmunohistochemistry capabilities have been expanded with the addition of an automated DAKOimmunostainer. We also offer Laser Capture microdissection (PIXEL II) for a reasonable fee. We arecurrently developing automated image analysis capabilities as well as a web-based data bank that will beaccessible to all BCMCC researchers.All requests for services/tissue are submitted to the Resource Allocation Committee (RAC) for evaluation. Inconjunction with a statistician, a power analysis is done for the proposed study as part of the approvalprocess. The Resource is led by Thomas Wheeler, M.D., and Pamela Younes, M.S.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 991 publications
