[1756] Quality Control of Human Tissues Used in Research Studies

Y Shim, J Deeds, R Meyer, M-H Ryu, L Ostrom, P Fordjour, D Ruddy, S Kamatkar, J Monahan, R Mosher. Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, MA

Background: High quality tissue collections are required for human tissue based research. Tissue quality can be markedly affected by handling prior to fixation or freezing. When tissues are acquired from a variety of sources a QC quality control method must be standardized to ensure consistent experimental data. We present our QC data from frozen and FFPE tissues collected across a variety of sources.
Design: We collected 1985 human tissues in total, 883 in FFPE (344 in normal and 539 in tumor) and 1102 in frozen (529 in normal and 573 in tumor), in 24 different tissue types from 9 different tissue sources between Mar. 2005 and Jun. 2008. Each sample was HandE stained and samples were excluded based on poor composition or autolysis. For protein QC, IHC staining against pSTAT3 antibody was performed on FFPE samples and for RNA QC, RNA was extracted from frozen samples. We only analyzed the data for a subset of tissue sources and tissue types (4 different tissue sources and 5 different tissue types with greater than 50 samples). Normal frozen samples were excluded from this analysis. Positive pSTAT3 staining indicates protein QC pass and good RNA quality indicates RNA QC pass.
Results: pSTAT3 and RNA results by tissue source and tissue type are shown in Table1 and 2. Among different tissue sources, the pSTAT3 QC pass rate varied from 87% 92% and the RNA QC pass rate varied from 80% 88%. Among different tissue types, the pSTAT3 QC pass rate also varied from 86 % 91% and the RNA QC pass rate varied from 79 % 94%. There is a significant percentage of N/A due to no data available, tissue not processed, tissue processed but yield too low or no RIN detected for RNA QC.


Conclusions: 1. Variation in quality of protein and RNA among different tissue sources and tissue types was observed but overall the sample quality was good. 2. In general, the quality of breast samples was lower for both protein and RNA. 3. It is recommended to have on-site QC done.
Category: Techniques

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 1:00 PM

Poster Session VI # 209, Wednesday Afternoon