The University of Pittsburgh has been awarded a contract to provide tumor types to the NCI for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. Specifically this award is to fund the provision of endometrial, hepatocellular and head and neck cases. These cases are all primary and untreated. The collection of the specimens is being performed according to standard protocols, developed by us, and consistent with NCI guidelines for Best Practices for biorespositories. The primary goal has been to accure samples of the highest quality, with minimal warm ischemic time. Tracking of warm ischemic time is performed. Frozen sections are cut from the sample being prepared for TCGA. This frozen section is evaluated by a board certified pathologist with sub-specialty expertise in the specific tumor type being assessed. The assessment serves as a mechanism to ascertain cellular composition. If the specimen fails our QA, we retrieve additional specimens from that case or consider that case to have failed internal QA. These frozen section slides are then sent with the sample to an NCI core laboratory where pathology metrics are confirmed and molecular analytes extracted. The original de-identified pathology report is available for each case. Clinical data annotation is available for every case that is being offered as part of TCGA. The data annotation proposed is retrospective.
