Identification of critical changes in gene expression that are responsible for the malignant phenotype haslong been the goal of biomedical researchers in the basic and clinical sciences. Much has been learnedconcerning disease mechanism using model systems (tissue culture and animals) but the translation offindings in model systems to human clinical disease has been less than optimal. The latter is due at least inpart to the complexity of human clinical disease which results from the vast number of genes which areactive in cellular metabolism and the co-morbidities associated with an individual patient's disease which canalter or bias the phenotype of the disease process. The development of high throughput testing methodssuch as DMA chip technologies for measuring gene expression, chromosomal hybridization and singlenucleotide polymporphisms has in part addressed the issue of biological complexity at the cellular level.However, acquiring clinical co-morbidity and treatment data that is likely to affect patient outcome and mayimpact changes in cellular metabolism is more difficult as it relies on various manual human recording andreporting systems.The Tissue and Data Acquisition and Analysis Core (TDAAC) has as its goal the acquisition of humanspecimens and associated clinical and pathologic findings to support translational research of the targetdisease. To this end it supports an IRB approved protocol 'Tissue Acquisition System to Support CancerResearch' (TASSCR) as well as other investigator initiated IRB approved protocols to support specificinvestigative questions. Because TDAAC is an outgrowth of a multicenter grant that focused on geneexpression microarray studies on multiple cancer phenotypes, some samples have associated geneexpression data as a part of their annotation. TDAAC faculty and staff support translational research throughacquisition of annotated tissue and blood samples under high ethical standards utilizing patient informedconsent and treatment of specimens such that the primary purpose of the specimen for patient care ismaintained and the quality of the specimen is optimal for biomedical research.
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