Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center

The SPORE in Breast Cancer: Research: Cores

Tissue Core

Specific Aims

1. To collect, process, bank, and distribute human breast tumor and matched normal tissue samples to investigators in the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) Breast Cancer SPORE.
2. To perform quality control to ensure that the relevant tissue is supplied to the researcher and suitable for the planned research (not necrotic or involved by unsuspected disease processes).
3. To protect patient confidentiality through use of a pre-surgical consent form that specifically addresses use of extraneous tissue from a clinically indicated surgical procedure for research purposes through de-identification of specimens.
4. To work with the VICC Clinical & Research Informatics Resource to establish an informatics strategy for networking of requests, specimen tracking, extraction of clinicopathologic data relating to specimens of interest, and linkage to research data.
5. To provide expertise in bone histology and histomorphometry.
6. To provide laser capture microdissection services to Breast SPORE investigators.
7. To provide tissue microarray services to Breast SPORE investigators.
8. To provide expertise in developing, performing, and evaluating immunohistochemical (IHC) and FISH assays for Breast SPORE investigators, including IHC on tissue microarrays.
9. To provide expertise in evaluation of the histopathology of human breast tumor xenografts in mice.