NCI Announces Funding Opportunity for Biospecimen Core

The core will serve as a center for receiving, qualifying, processing, and distributing annotated biospecimens to the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC).

CPTAC initiative has done protein biomarker discovery and verification studies in tumor tissue samples previously characterized at the genomic and transcriptomic level by the NCI's Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) team. In the first phase of the project, participating researchers undertook analysis of three tumor types — breast, colorectal, and ovarian.

In the next phase the project aims to extend their analysis to additional cancer types. According to the agency, this work will require the acquisition of high-quality, clinically annotated, primary, and untreated tumor specimens from patients with specific cancer types.

Tissue Source Sites will prospectively collect samples consisting of primary human tumors, blood, and non-malignant tissue according to protocols optimized for proteomics, which will then be passed on to the Biospecimen Core Resource.