The mission of the North Central Cancer Treatment Group (NCCTG) is to improve the duration and quality of life of cancer patients by performing high-quality clinical and translational research in the community setting. The NCCTG (Biospecimen Resource will support the NCCTG mission by providing superior biospecimens from patients enrolled on NCCTG trials that 1) are fully and consistently annotated, 2) have been collected under optimized standard conditions, 3) have undergone quality assessment, and 4) are stored under controlled conditions allowing efficient retrieval for distribution to qualified researchers. The five specific aims of this application are 1) To maximize collection of biospecimens from patients enrolled on NCCTG and other cooperative group clinical trials.
This aim will serve to increase the numbers of biospecimens available for translational research so that more studies with sufficient statistical power can be accommodated;2) To consistently and completely annotate biospecimens collected.
This aim will serve to provide a crucial element in translational research, namely to define the context of standard clinical-pathologic indices, treatments, response to treatment, and disease outcome within which the significance of the measured biologic parameters of translational studies will be evaluated;3) To develop standard operating procedures (SOP) for collecting, processing, and storing biospecimens. The use of SOPs will enhance the Biospecimen Resource by providing uniformity so that biospecimens for a given translational study are comparable with one another;4) To develop new methods for analysis of biospecimens. Technologies are constantly developing that expand our ability to analyze biospecimens. In this aim we describe three technologies that we are refining (tissue microarray construction) and developing (analysis of circulating tumor cells and extraction of RNA from formalin-fixed paraffin embedded tissue blocks) as examples of new methodologies that expand the use of biospecimens;and 5) To provide oversight to the resource and a mechanism for access to the resource for the research community.
This aim will describe the oversight of the Biospecimen Resource and how we will provide a public link to the mechanism for requesting biospecimens. A prioritization system and evaluation criteria are defined.
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