UVA receives $3 million NCI grant to expand tissue sample collection

The UVA Health System has been awarded more than $3 million from the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute to support and expand a critically important program that makes tissue samples available for research on diseases ranging from breast cancer to lung disease. The five-year grant enables UVA to launch a partnership with Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) and the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) to collect samples there as well.

“One of the bottlenecks in translational research is getting diseased human biosamples to study,” said grant recipient Christopher Moskaluk, MD, PhD, chairman of the UVA Department of Pathology and a leader of the NCI-designated UVA Cancer Center. “There is a critical need for specimens, and we realized if we could get partners we could increase the number of samples we could provide.”

EVMS and MUSC will be asked to collect samples that are in particularly great demand, such as from breast and brain cancers. “These are samples we really find hard to fulfill the need for,” Moskaluk said.

The samples are collected, with patient permission, from extra tissues leftover from diagnosis. This rescues useful tissue that would otherwise be discarded. “After diagnosis, the rest of the tissue is destroyed. It’s incinerated,” Moskaluk said. “It’s a horrible waste.”

The Cooperative Human Tissue Network, a network of academic medical centers organized by the National Cancer Institute, aims to put that tissue to good use by sharing it with biomedical researchers. The new grant funding continues UVA’s longstanding relationship with the network, which also includes Ohio State University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Pennsylvania, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Vanderbilt University. Over its 27-year history, the CHTN has distributed close to 1 million specimens, resulting in more than 2,500 scientific publications.

UVA was chosen to join the network in 2001 partly based on UVA’s expertise in creating tissue microarrays, Moskaluk said. Unlike typical microscope slides that contain only one tissue sample, a microarray can contain hundreds of samples, making for easy, efficient comparison. “It really speeds up the scientific process,” Moskaluk said.

Only select institutions have the resources and expertise to create microarrays, which are in great demand by researchers. The new grant, Moskaluk said, will allow UVA to increase production to help meet that demand. In addition, it will allow the UVA researchers to expand production to include prostate cancer and other tissue types not currently available.

The NIH grant, spanning five years, is No. 1 UM1 CA183712-01.

FOR REPORTERS: Moskaluk will be available for interviews this morning. To arrange an interview, contact Josh Barney at 434.906.8864 or [email protected]. Photographs are available of both Moskaluk and a tissue microarray created at UVA.