Scientific Director: Mark W. Lingen, DDS, PhD
HTRC Technical Director: Leslie Martin
IHC Subcore Technical Director: Terri Li
Website: pathcore.bsd.uchicago.edu
(Read an article in Pathways to Discovery)
The effective procurement, storage, distribution, and analysis of human biospecimens are of critical importance to the mission of the UCCCC and the university's cancer programs. The Human Tissue Resource Center (HTRC) provides investigators with a centralized infrastructure to optimize the efficiency and costs related to research involving human biospecimens. In this way, the core provides a coordinated, centralized, and dedicated program for the procurement, processing, dispersing, and assessment of all types of biospecimens. Thus, duplication of personnel, equipment, and information systems is avoided, and coordination of activities is assured. The HTRC comprises four integrated subcores: biospecimen bank (BSB), laser capture microdissection (LCM), and pathology image analysis (PIA), and immunohistochemistry (IHC).
The HTRC offers efficient and cost-effective options for:
- Biobanking of solid tissues, lymphocytes, and bodily fluids including serum, plasma, saliva, and urine
- Pathological verification and analysis of tissue samples
- Histological services including routine tissue formalin fixation, processing, paraffin embedding, microtomy, H&E staining, and immunostaining
- Tissue microarray (TMA) fabrication
- Laser capture microdissection (LCM)
- Quantitative image analysis of immunohistochemistry on conventional and tissue microarray sections, including tissue scoring, rare event detection, microvascular density counting, ploidy analysis, integrated optical density analysis, and tissue microarray scoring
