The Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center is a not-for-profit basic research institute founded in 1991 specializing in cancer research with an emphasis on the development of gene therapy, especially immuno-gene therapy, antisense gene, and related therapies for the treatment of glioblastoma and prostate, breast, and colon carcinomas. The center has grown rapidly to 19 principal investigators and over 90 support personal. All research programs are supported in part by one or more competitively awarded research grants mostly from the USPH Service. A major core facility, the Tumor Registry, is being developed for the fresh and cryopreserved normal and tumor specimens for genetic analysis. The registry is unique in that a program of rapid acquisition and cryopreservation has been developed including quality control and characterization of all samples. Investigators of a number of NIH- supported programs noted that the goals of their programs would be greatly facilitated by the availability of the newly developed laser capture microdissection instrument such as the Arcturus PixCellTM. An integrated program is proposed to provide this instrument as part of the Tumor Registry. Moreover, the instrument will be an on-line facility via the institutional server to all users in house and in the surrounding community. Finally, the instrument will be adapted to carry out two- and three-dimensional morphometric analysis and quantitative analysis of tissue sections labeled by histochemical methods, immunohistochemical methods or in situ hybridization methods. Labeling also may be used to electronically identify by predefined criteria all lesions for microdissection. Thus, a highly versatile, unique and generally available community facility is proposed for multigene and morphometric analysis of human tumor specimens.
