The goal of the Tissue Core is to provide investigators in the Pancreas SPORE with high quality patient data, DNA, RNA, serum, circulating tumor cells, and pancreas tissues from pancreatic cancer patients, and to make these resources available for future studies. The activities of the Tissue Core will be overseen under the combined leadership of Dr. W. Lingle, Director of the TACMA and Co-Director of the BAP Shared Resources of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, and Dr. T. Smyrk, anatomic pathologist. The activities of the Tissue Core will be conducted in a way that does not compromise patient confidentiality, yet will be as comprehensive as possible in the materials that are provided. The acquisition of human tissue and subsequent cellular/molecular analysis of that tissue within the context of pathology and patient data are key to many laboratory-based studies of cancer. The Mayo Clinic has a strong tradition of ethically sound support of research that links tissue acquisition and patient data records. Paraffin embedded tissues, histological slides, and associated patient charts from surgeries performed since the first decade of the 1900's are maintained in Mayo's Tissue Registry and the Mayo Archives. The Tissue and Cell Molecular Analysis (TACMA) Shared Resource of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center is a resource of expertise and service for immunohistochemistry, laser capture microdissection, tissue microarray preparation, and digital imaging. Likewise, the Biospecimen Accessioning and Processing (BAP) Shared Resource of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center is the primary site of accessioning and standardized processing of blood, frozen tissue, and other non-paraffin embedded specimens collected explicitly for research. New methodologies for biospecimen collection, processing, and analysis will be developed in the Tissue Core. These methodologies will be shared with other Mayo SPORE Tissue Cores and integrated with services offered by the BAP and TACMA Shared Resources. Tissue Core activities will be closely coordinated with the newly formed Clinical Research Core and with the Biostatistics Core to provide seamless linkage of clinical annotations with research biospecimens. Core D will be integrated with the existing tissue-oriented Cancer Center shared resources and the other scientific Cores in this SPORE in order to provide a coordinated, centralized, dedicated program for standardized collection, accessioning, processing, and evaluation of biospecimens and patient data from pancreatic cancer patients. Furthermore, the Tissue Core will make biospecimens collected for this SPORE available to the pancreas cancer research community in order to stimulate translational research with the goal of improving prevention and treatment of pancreatic cancer.
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