Rapid progress towards improved diagnostics and effective therapies for human glioma requires access to a reliable, extensive and well described source of tumor tissue, backed up by all relevant clinical data. We have established and maintained a tissue biorepository for brain tumors at our center since 1992. It currently contains over 1,300 eases, each represented by specimens in several states: snap-frozen samples collected in the operating room, viable primary explant cultures, normal and tumor genomic DNA and paraffin-embedded multiple directed biopsies are routinely collected, and all amenable to different modes of analysis, making a wide range of studies possible. Analysis of specimens from this biorepository has already resulted in 54 publications and 62 published abstracts. In addition to the tissue, and of equal importance, is the description of the clinical population. This has been achieved to date by documentation of the proceedings of our neuro-oncology tumor board, and resulted in the collection of clinical demographics and outcomes, responses to therapy, time-to-tumor-progression and overall survival data. Here we propose to expand and maintain this biorepository as our surgical case load increases, and extend its use by analyzing samples with new high throughput molecular technologies, while also developing the information tools to allow the correlation of research and clinical data. Efforts are underway to apply high throughput genomic technology to all the glioma samples in our biorepository, initially by performing LOH analysis at 12 discrete loci known to be important in gliomagenesis and progression. Importantly our biorepository has also been selected as the tissue source for the NCI Brain Tumor Genome Anatomy Project's comprehensive eDNA microarray analysis of gene expression. The application of these methodologies will allow the identification of clinically relevant sub-types of glioma on a molecular basis. Successful completion of this work will result in a biorepository containing glioma samples that are comprehensively characterized at the molecular and clinical level, and for which ample material remains for exploitation with new analysis modalities, such as proteomics. We seek support to expand this multi-use glioma biorepository into an ongoing resource of the best characterized glioma material with clinical correlative and genomic data available.
