Biospecimen/Bioimaging Core

ABSTRACT – BIOSPECIMEN / BIOIMAGING CORE The Biospecimen/Bioimaging Core leverages infrastructure of the Stanford Urology and Pathology departments, but augments services to benefit O’Brien Center investigators. Led by a qualified team, the centralized resource provides qualitative advantages and efficiencies of scale. The Core procures and provides

Center investigators with needed biospecimens, including fresh, freshly-frozen, and formalin-fixed paraffin- embedded (FFPE) prostate issues. The Core also performs less visible but equally important activities, including patient consent, quality control/assurance, database management, clinicopathologic annotation, and

regulatory compliance. In addition, the Core provides tissue characterization services, including histology, tissue microarrays, laser microdissection, and multiplex immunohistochemistry (IHC) using MIBI-TOF (Multiplexed Ion Beam Imaging by Time of Flight). MIBI-TOF is a powerful and robust technology that

harnesses metal-tagged antibodies for the simultaneous quantification of 40 or more antibody targets, with superior spatial resolution and dynamic range. The Core also stores and provides portal access to images including prostate MRIs, whole-mount histology and IHC, and MIBI-TOF data, as well as an integrated multi-

scale prostate Atlas spanning MRI to histology, cells and molecules. The Biospecimen/Bioimaging Core provides essential tissue procurement, characterization and imaging services to support the three Center Projects, the Education Enrichment and Opportunity Pool programs, as well as outside O’Brien Centers, P20

grant programs, and the broader benign urology community, .