The Duke Cancer Institute's Biospecimen Repository and Processing Core/Shared Resource (BRPC) is the result of substantially increased institutional support for biobanking at Duke since the last CCSG renewal. The BRPC utilizes the strong infrastructure of the previous CCSG-supported biobanking Shared Resource, the Tissue and Blood Procurement Core, and incorporated its existing collection. However, the BRPC has significant advantages to DCI members because it stems from a concerted institutional and ground-up effort to reinvent and strengthen the resource to better meet biobanking needs across the institution. The BRPC's priority is to maximize tissue available for research while ensuring that sufficient, intact tissue is available for clinical pathologic assessment and reporting. It achieves this by integration with the Department of Pathology, and it functions under the favored honest-broker model of biobanking. BRPC obtains consent and collects tissue for both true excess tissue surgical events as well as additional tissue biopsy events (paired needle core breast biopsies, for example). Governance of biospecimen use is provided separately by the 10 disease-site groups of the DCI (distinct from but overlapping the nine CCSG-identified Research Programs) for relevant biospecimens. Since inception of the facility in 2012, BRPC services have been utilized by 49 Duke faculty, 38 of whom are DCI members. The DCI users represent eight of the nine DCI CCSG-recognized Research Programs. The BRPC operating budget is supported by the DCI (71%) and the Duke School of Medicine (29%) to support the initial growth and development of the BRPC. Year one of operations was completely subsidized (for 600 unique patient biobanking consenting and collection events) in an effort to increase investigator and disease- site working group awareness of the shared resource. In year two and beyond, gradual charge backs have been implemented and satisfied investigators are building the BRPC into their grant and contract applications. The BRPC's immediate objectives are to (1) engage additional user groups from the DCI; (2) prepare for the transition to a new informatics system expected in mid-2014. Our long-term objectives are to formalize a process for true overnight banking across multiple interested parties and to provide DCI members access to Duke's clinical archives of paraffin-embedded biospecimens, in accordance with clinical requirements.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 513 publications
