Core C: Pathology, Biospecimen and Immune Profiling

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The Pathology, Biospecimen and Immune Profiling Core will select, bank, and provide centralized pathologic analysis for biospecimens collected in the RESPOND cohort, ensuring that uniformly high quality biospecimen analytes are available for all downstream analyses. The Core will principally support Projects 2, 3 and 4 with biospecimens, biospecimen analytes and pathologic and image databases. The major functions of the Core are to pathologically annotate and bank formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) prostate tumor tissue for approximately 3,000 patients within RESPOND (Projects 2, 3 and 4), isolate and quantify nucleic acids from these tissues (Project 3) and from 7,500 saliva samples (Project 2) with appropriate quality control/quality assurance measures, and test and implement image analysis technologies for interrogating tumor-associated immune infiltrates in situ (Project 4). The Core’s activities will be centered at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and will leverage the numerous ongoing biospecimen banking efforts and prostate tumor tissue analyses at JHU, including the JHU Prostate Cancer SPORE Biospecimen/Pathology Core and the CDMRP Prostate Cancer Biorepository Network (PCBN). The core will be led by two urologic pathologists, Tamara Lotan MD (PI, JHU) and Angelo M. De Marzo MD PhD (co-I, JHU) as well as two scientists with extensive expertise for specific biospecimen analyses relevant to the Core, Karen Sfanos PhD (co-I, JHU) and Chris Haiman (co-I, USC). In addition to extensive support for 3 Projects, the Core’s biobank and database will provide an ongoing resource for all future research endeavors utilizing the RESPOND cohort and its biospecimens.