Necessity of an Erasmus MC Tissue Bank
A growing need is anticipated for large collections of well-diagnosed fresh frozen tumor tissue and, if available, corresponding pre-malignant and normal tissue samples.
Research in Molecular Tumor Biology over the last years has been characterized by turbulent developments. The elucidation of the complete human DNA sequence and unprecedented breakthroughs in genomics, proteomics and bio-informatics, made it possible to develop high throughput techniques. Accessibility to these techniques for researchers in the Erasmus Medical Center will be greatly enhanced in the coming years, which will enable research on the expression of large numbers of known and unknown RNA’s and proteins in large series of biologic material in relatively short experiments. This will make it possible to investigate expression profiles of diseases in distinct stages and identify new proteins, mutations and even complete regulatory pathways in progression processes of diseases.
Therefore, a growing need is anticipated for large collections of well-diagnosed fresh frozen tumor tissue and, if available, corresponding pre-malignant and normal tissue samples. Such a collection would enable high quality DNA, RNA and protein isolation from well documented frozen tissues accompanied by a solid diagnosis. To facilitate easy search for the availability of tissues for research projects the generation of an anonymous database containing documentation of the frozen tissue samples with as many attributes as possible is inevitable. In addition, the database will contain digital histologic images of the frozen specimen to enable good evaluation of the groups acquired from searching the database, before employing the valuable tissue specimen. The images will be provided in two magnifications, 100x (overview) and 400x (specific). The addition of these images to the database enables direct viewing of the histology of the stored tissue specimen.
In addition, it is expected that an institutional tissue bank as described here will not be able to cover in short periods of time the complete demand of certain tissue types. This can only be accomplished by the formation of large networks of systematic tissue banks in which the demands can be shared in large and rich standardized collections of fresh frozen tumor tissue. At this moment plans for a national and a European network are in progress.