National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank: An Invaluable Informatics Tool for Cancer Researchers

Mesothelioma is a particularly aggressive and treatment/cure resistant form of asbestos-caused lung cancer that is diagnosed in approximately 4,000 people in the United States each year. Subsequent to diagnosis, patient survival time now averages 10 to 11 months, and as a result of such consistently poor prognoses, there is a particular sense of urgency amongst those researchers who are seeking novel treatments and an eventual cure for the disease.

Translational, bench and clinical researchers who are involved in the fight against mesothelioma now have an invaluable new tool in their scientific investigation arsenal known as the National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank (NMVB). Funded by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP), the NMVB provides researchers with state-of-the-art software resources designed to facilitate the online location and procurement of high quality mesothelioma tissue specimens and accompanying multimodal annotated data. Cancer researchers of all types welcome the federally funded tissue bank and Unified Modeling Language-based data storage and retrieval architecture that will greatly assist in the genomic and proteomic profiling of the mesothelioma cancer cell.

The NMVB was over four years in the planning, and its genesis is chiefly due to an initial $1 million NIOSH grant to University of Pittsburgh Medical Center physician Dr. Michael Becich, whose work at the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Biomedical Informatics (UPDBI) has led the department to become one of the nation's leading innovators in data sharing architecture. The NMVB's use of second generation caTissue Clinical Annotation Engine software provides researchers with universally comprehensible and optimally shareable genotype, pathologic, clinical, epidemiologic, and outcome data annotation on high quality mesothelioma tissue specimens that are catalogued and housed at numerous research institutions nationwide.

Advanced Informatics History

The UPDBI has extensive experience in providing medical researchers with superior knowledge and specimen sharing informatics architecture, and it has developed such programs for: the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid; the Pennsylvania Cancer Alliance Bioinformatics Consortium; the Cooperative Prostate Cancer Tissue Resource; the Early Diagnosis Research Network ( for colon and pancreatic cancer), and the Shared Pathology Informatics Network. All of the UPDBI architectures work to integrate common data elements that utilize managed vocabulary and ontology to ensure maximum interoperability and optimal end-user utility of mesothelioma tissue specimens and clinical annotations.

A Broad Spectrum of Data

The NMVB provides researchers and institutions alike with a high level of interconnectivity that allows the sharing of mesothelioma tissue specimens with annotations on: histopathologic type; stage of the malignancy; therapies received; the procurement of benign tissues and expected follow-up time; recurrence, and metastatic disease. Over 600 annotated mesothelioma cases and approximately 900 biological specimens are archived in the NMVB; tissue specimens include blood and DNA exemplars, fresh frozen, and paraffin-embedded samples.

The NMVB database includes tissue micro array specimens from 40 mesothelioma patients, each high quality sample accompanied by numerous data sets that include information on the patient's age at time of diagnosis, tumor size, the patient's race, type of asbestos exposures, current patient status and more. Finally, NMVB pathologists are available to assist the remote researcher with specimen analysis, statistics interpretation, and future research program planning.

To receive a FREE Mesothelioma Web information packet** or to make a request, please fill out the following form :

**For a FREE information packet including treatments, clinical trials, and specialists, please complete the form above or call a Mesothelioma Web coordinator at 1-877-367-6376.

News

Resources

This site complies with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information: verify here

If you would like to receive a FREE information packet or have questions about mesothelioma, call us at:

Toll-Free 1-877-367-6376