Biobank and registry networking opens new possibilities for assessment of the effect of treatment and for identifying new molecular markers useful for selection of optimal treatment.

Population-based biobanks with samples taken many years ago are available in Sweden including material from many randomized treatment trials.A necessary refinement of the existing biobanks to enable large-scale and effective assessment of the presence of markers under identical staining conditions that do not use up valuable materials is to construct tissue arrays of well-characterized patient cohorts.

In order to preserve these valuable materials we have within the National Tissue Micro Array Center started the construction of high quality tissue arrays including thousands of specific tumors as well as material from other diseases. Clinical information has also been gathered and we will be able to offer the research community sets of large and high quality arrays linked to clinical information.

Achievements during 2006 and status of the center

• The TMA center is formed and fully functional with several successfully arranged arrays.

• Technology collaboration with the TMA inventor Juha Kononen (Beecher Inc.),Fredrik Pontén (Human Proteome Resource, Uppsala), and Slidepath, (Dublin,Ireland).

• Center open as facility for array constructions of external materials.

• An automatic Tissue Array Robot in use.

• Several large breast cancer arrays (<3000 patients) with clinical data completed, including unique randomized treatment trials (tamoxifen).

• All breast cancer cases in the Malmö Diet and Cancer cohort arrayed and in use.

• Several other arrays completed: prostate cancer, heart, colorectal cancer, AML, ALL

• Around 25 publications with associations to the center.

• Discovery of markers that can predict if a breast cancer will respond to tamoxifen treatment or not.

• 20 research projects using arrays from the center (11 different universities).

• A yearly budget of 1 500 000 Skr.

• Prices for construction of external TMAs. Construction of a triple-array of 100 breast cancer samples: 10 000 Skr.

Future perspectives

1. To expand and consolidate the national tissue microarray (TMA) center at UMAS.

2. To concentrate on the construction of high quality TMAs based on top biobanks
available within the Nordic countries and link the TMAs with clinical and
epidemiological data.

3. To install state-of-the-art data base management of TMA-data linked to semiautomatic evaluation of TMA (EU-project and collaboration with Slidepath). This will increase the quality of the evaluations and secure data as well offer Internet and server based validation of tissue microarrays.
4. To expand the collaboration with HPR.