Research at Fox Chase »Research Facilities »Biosamples

Min Huang, MD, PhD 215-214-1754 Room C404 Director Karen Kaputa, MT 215-728-3861 Room C413 Tumor Bank Manager Yulan Gong, MD 215-728-8777 Room C405 Technician

Hospital Center Building Rooms C404, C405, C413 Min.Huang@fccc.edu

Function

The TBF provides human tumor tissue samples to all interested investigators who have filed a form and received approval from the Institutional Review Board. In addition to neoplastic tissues, the TBF also collects and distributes, when available, adjacent normal human tissues that are usually dissected from surgical specimens. The material is usually snap frozen and stored until required by the investigators. Approximately 20 non-frozen fresh, normal samples/year are delivered to researchers refrigerated at 4°C. Fresh/frozen samples are distributed to peer-review funded investigators (approximately 600 samples/year in the last few years, up four to six-fold since 1994).

The TBF also provides paraffin sections, stained or unstained from blocks that are prepared from fixed aliquots of the same tissue fragments that are stored at -70°C. These paraffin blocks are fixed in a freshly prepared 10% formaldehyde in phosphate buffer and allow for procedures such as immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization to be performed on exactly the same frozen sample that will be employed for biochemical or molecular analysis. These blocks constitute the TBF paraffin collection that is not part of the Surgical Pathology Archives. These general archives contain paraffin blocks from the same specimen (but not necessarily from the same region as the frozen sample) from which the TBF tissues have been obtained, and can be used for research, if required by the investigators.

Once the surgical pathologists have completed their diagnostic procedures and are convinced that their sampling will satisfy the diagnostic requirements, the excess tissues are processed for TBF purposes. The TBF also provides investigators with paraffin sections from the Surgical Pathology collection from specimens embedded prior to 1992, the year in which the facility started its own paraffin block collection. In addition, the TBF will also select and provide sections from paraffin blocks embedded by the Surgical Pathology laboratory when the requested cases have not been eligible for TBF acquisition because the material had to be used entirely for diagnostic purposes.

Description

The Tumor Bank Facility (TBF) is contained within the Department of Pathology and operates in the laboratories of Surgical Pathology and Experimental Histopathology. The collection of tissues that are snap frozen and stored in a -70°C freezer takes place in the laboratory of Surgical Pathology, immediately after the diagnostic procedures for each specimen have been completed. At this time, a representative sample of the frozen fraction of the specimen is fixed and taken to the Histopathology Facility where it will be embedded, cut, stained, and either stored or distributed to the interested investigators.

In addition, the TBF provides researchers with custom-made tissue microarrays. These can be designed with any normal or neoplastic tissues available in the TBF.