Title:Cooperative Tissue Human Network (Limited Competition U01)

Contact:

Yaffa Rubinstein, Ph.D.- Program Director, Cancer Diagnosis Program
Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis
National Cancer Institute
6130 Executive Blvd.
EPN, 6028
Rockville, MD 20852
Phone: 301-496-7147
FAX: 301-402-7819
E-mail: rubinsty@mail.nih.gov

Objective of Project:

The overall objective of this limited competition RFA is to request applications for cooperative agreements from current CHTN participating organizations to continue to provide access to high quality prospectively collected human biospecimens, with associated histopathologic and demographic data, to investigators throughout North America and elsewhere.

Description of Project:

The Cooperative Human Tissue Network was established by the NCI in 1987 to address the increasing demand by the scientific community for access to high quality human biospecimens for cancer research. http://www.chtn.ims.nci.nih.gov/index.html.

Often researchers are unable to establish the necessary clinical collaborations for access to the biospecimens they need. The CHTN collects and distributes high quality human tissue biospecimens to facilitate basic and developmental cancer research. The CHTN is a prospective procurement service network that responds to specific needs identified by investigators who apply for biospecimens and it serves a wide scientific community in the United States, Canada and other countries.

The CHTN provides malignant, benign, diseased and uninvolved (normal adjacent) tissues from individuals representing diverse demographic and ethnic groups. Each biospecimen is accompanied by basic demographic data including gender, age, and race, and diagnostic information. Tissue is provided either anonymized or de-identified. Donor identities or other identifying information are never provided to researchers.

The investigator can choose from several methods of specimen processing such as: fresh in medium, frozen, fixed, and paraffin embedded tissues, as well as frozen sections and sections from paraffin blocks or tissue micro-arrays (TMA) containing multiple tissue types. In addition, CHTN will provide isolated nucleic acid and micro-dissection upon request. All tissues are subjected to Quality Assurance/Quality Control procedures ensuring investigators a high quality product.

The CHTN divisions work both independently with individual investigators and together, as a seamless unit, to tailor the collection, processing, temporary storage and distribution of tissues in order to meet the exact needs of investigators and fulfill their requests. Such networking is accomplished using an informatics system developed by the CHTN and via harmonized standard operating procedures (SOPs).