The UNC Breast Cancer SPORE Tissue Procurement & Pathology Core (TPP) Facility is a multifunctional facility, comprised of multiple components including Tissue Procurement and Translational Pathology. This Core provides centralized, quality controlled, quality assured procurement, processing, analysis, storage and distribution of normal and malignant breast tissue, blood specimens and other human specimens in support of basic science, translational, genomic, population and clinical trial cancer research. In addition to tissue and blood procurement services, the facility performs extraction of high quality DNA from whole blood, peripheral blood mononuclear cells, buccal smears and mouth rinses and immortalization of breast cancer patient lymphocytes. Importantly this group provides functional access to many other scientific and administrative groups such as Immunogenetics and Analysis and the Office of Clinical Translational Research. The Lineberger Data Warehouse (Core B), an Oracle-based, customized user-friendly database, operating on an honest broker model to protect identity and confidentiality, provides the infrastructure to monitor and survey each specimen and associated information. This provides a coordinated system of quality control, sample tracking and distribution of specimens to appropriate investigators. Breast cancer-specific efforts that have and will support SPORE aims include centralized tissue and specimen banking, receipt and processing of breast-related human specimens including: freshly procured, snap-frozen and formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) block specimens, preparation of tissue microarrays (TMAs), cell microarrays, morphological evaluation and morphology-based assays (immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence, in-situ hybridization, and fluorescence in-situ hybridization), assay development & training, and digital imaging and image analysis for spatial quantification of molecular analytes in intact specimens. Project # 1, CBCS, has used the core for over two decades. Projects #2, #3, and #4 will specifically use the cores for samples from clinical trials (Projects #3 and #4) and to obtain fresh tissue to flow sort cells for assays (Project #2) and to prepare primary cultured cells from individual patients (Projects #2 and #4).
The UNC Breast SPORE has heavily integrated tissue and blood-based studies that require a high performance Biospecimens/Pathology Core. These include high-volume analyses on FFPE tissues for population-based studies (Project 1), high complex analyses on fixed and frozen tissue from clinical trials (Project #3), and frozen tissue procurement and processing for lab-based translational studies (Projects #2 and #4).
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