Human Tissue and Organ Resource for Research

NCRR supports the Human Tissues and Organs Resource for Research (HTOR) Cooperative Agreement. This is a procurement network within the National Disease Research Interchange (NDRI). NDRI is a nonprofit organization that procures and distributes normal and diseased human biomaterials, tissues, and organs to biomedical researchers in academia, government, and industry.

Tissue and organ donation to research provides an opportunity for people who wish to become donors, but whose tissues and organs cannot qualify for transplantation and might otherwise be discarded. Studies with human tissues and organs also serve as alternatives to the use of live animals in research.

By collaborating with various medical centers, hospitals, pathology services, eye banks, tissue banks, and organ procurement organizations, HTOR provides a wide variety of human tissues and organs—both diseased and normal—to researchers for laboratory studies. Such samples include tissues from the nervous system; pulmonary system; cardiovascular system; endocrine system; eyes, bone, and cartilage.

More than 4,000 specimens are delivered by HTOR annually to universities, medical centers, and biotechnology companies to facilitate scientific advances for a variety of biomedical sciences. Examples of science areas include biochemistry, cell biology, cancer diagnoses and treatments, infectious diseases, immunological diseases, cardiology, endocrinology, ophthalmology, nephrology, toxicology, and transplantation.

HTOR services are customized to the needs of each individual research protocol. Researchers who wish to receive tissues or organs should contact HTOR prior to completing their application forms. Approved researchers are entered into a queue for the appropriate specimen and are served, in turn, when the requested specimen becomes available. The charges for these tissues and organs are nominal.