Biospecimen and Data Management Core Our Biospecimen and Data Management Core will be utilized by all the Research Projects in our Center. All three proposed Research Projects aim to identify mechanisms by which tumor cells, metastatic to regional lymph nodes, interface with the host immune system to perturb systemic immunity to induce global immune tolerance. While we will methodically study this process in murine models (Project 1), analysis of human tumor and lymph node specimens is paramount for two primary reasons. The first reason is to ensure the translation of the murine discovery approach to human disease. The second reason is to facilitate the discovery of critical mediators of tumor-induced immunosuppression directly from the human samples, and then follow with functional validation in our murine models. Hence it is critical that we establish the necessary infrastructure to procure viable human tumor specimens and autologous tumor-infiltrating immune cells. Importantly, matched sets of fresh primary tumor cells, metastatic tumor cells, tumor-infiltrating immune cells (from the primary tumor and the lymph nodes) and circulating immune cells will be collected to address the hypotheses and goals of the Research Projects. Furthermore, in this shared core, a database of clinical annotation (aka clinical metadata) for these matched samples will be created and maintained. This clinical metadata is critical for interpretation of our molecular and imaging data, given tumor and patient heterogeneity, and will likely provide important insights into how the data generated by the proposed projects may be used to guide treatment and predict outcome. Our proposed Biospecimen and Data Management Core will focus on collecting tissue and collating all the molecular data on our two index cancer models: melanoma and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC).
The specific aims of our Core are: (1) Establishment of a fresh tumor and lymph node biorepository; (2) Establishment of disease-specific clinical and pathologic databases; (3) Establishment of a repository for data generated by the three proposed projects. Although we will focus on establishing this core for two diseases (melanoma and HNSCC), we envision that our core will enable expansion to future projects in these cancers and to different cancers.
