Biospecimens and Patient Registry Core
The Biospecimens and Patient Registry Core provides investigators in the Mayo Clinic Ovarian Cancer SPORE with high-quality patient data, DNA, RNA, blood products and tissues from patients with ovarian cancer, fallopian tube cancer and primary peritoneal carcinoma. These samples are also available for use in future studies.
Mayo Clinic has a strong tradition of ethically sound support of research that links tissue acquisition and patient data records. Paraffin-embedded tissues, histological slides and associated patient charts from surgeries performed since the first decade of the 1900s are maintained in Mayo Clinic's Tissue Registry and in the Mayo Clinic archives.
The Pathology Research Core of the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center is a resource of expertise, collaborative support and service for immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridization, tissue microarray construction and digital imaging.
The Biospecimens Accessioning and Processing Core is the primary site of accessioning and standardized processing of blood and frozen tissue collected specifically for research from Mayo Clinic's campuses in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.
The Cytogenetics Core has expertise in establishing, validating and scoring fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) studies.
The Ovarian Cancer SPORE's Biospecimens and Patient Registry Core is integrated with these existing tissue-oriented Cancer Center shared resources and other scientific cores of this SPORE to provide a coordinated, centralized and dedicated program for standardized collection, accessioning, processing, morphological classification and evaluation of biospecimens and patient data from patients with ovarian cancer.
Thorough clinical and molecular genetic annotation is required to maximize the potential use of tissue specimens in translational research. Therefore, risk factor questionnaires, clinical records, panel testing of ovarian cancer susceptibility genes, and pathology review are incorporated into the core.
Research services provided to SPORE investigators include pathologic review of tumor histology, tumor sectioning and quality control, blood processing, construction of tissue microarrays (TMAs), immunohistochemistry (IHC), and FISH.
The Biospecimens and Patient Registry Core coordinates activities with the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core to provide seamless linkage of clinical annotation with research specimens for data management and analyses.