The Tissue Procurement and Banking Facility (TPBF) provides all basic science and clinical investigators at MDACC with access to human tissues that have been removed by therapeutic resection or biopsy. The goals of the shared resource are to: 1) maintain a flexible specialized tissue-procurement resource that provides requesting investigators efficient and expeditious delivery to requesting investigators of freshlyobtained well-characterized and custom-processed tumor and control tissue from patients in operating rooms, procedure rooms and clinics;2) maintain and improve a centralized institution-wide tissue procurement and banking core facility that provides specimens according to NCI Best Practices for Biospecimen Resources and compatible with current, emerging, and anticipated methodologies for analysis of DNA, RNA and protein;3) interface with other institutional databases to enhance the intranet-based database so it will provide epidemiology, family history, patient treatment, and patient outcome;4) support the individual programmatically administered and funded satellite tissue banks operational within the institution, including those maintained by disease sites, SPOREs and P01s;and 5) meet the federal, state and institutional regulatory requirements for use of human tissue in research and protection of human subjects. The Facility occupies 379 sq ft and 187 sq ft within the two Surgical Pathology suites and has a separate 2,500 sq ft secure, monitored, environmentally-controlled facility with 21 freezers. Additional tissue processing rooms for TPBF use are located in each clinic with procedure rooms. The TPBF is staffed with a Director, Laboratory Manager, 2 Tissue Procurement Specialists, 2 Tissue Laboratory Assistants, a Data Coordinator, and a Clinical Research Coordinator. During the previous funding period, 154,122 specimens were collected from 21,902 cases. A total of 124,378 specimens were distributed with 87% provided to 14 peer-reviewed funded satellite banks, 5% to peer-reviewed funded individual investigators, 7% to non-peer reviewed funded individual investigators, and 1% to non-peer reviewed funded satellite banks. Individual investigators can obtain tissue specimens from satellite banks and the TPBF. TPBF services were used by 66 investigators from 19 of the 21 CCSG programs. 65% of the individual users had peer-reviewed funding and accounted for 40% of the utilization by individual users. Future plans are focused on interfacing with clinical, epidemiologic, tumor registry, and protocol databases to enhance specimen annotation through the TissueStation and ResearchStation software initiatives;quality control/quality assurance including evaluation with the Biospecimen Repository Evaluation Tool (BRET) from the National Cancer Institute;completion of compliance with the NCI Best Practices for Biospecimen Resources that were issued in June of 2007 and Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act of 1988, and continuing to expand capacity to meet research needs.
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