Tissue Bank and Procurement - LifeSpan BioSciences

LifeSpan's Tissue Resources

LifeSpan has established extensive tissue resources in order to support its contract research services and protein localization databases. These resources include a massive internal collection of over 2 million tissue specimens, normal and diseased tissue microarrays, and a network of commercial and academic partners that can fulfill custom tissue requests. To ensure availability of the most commonly requested tissues, LifeSpan has prioritized its tissue procurement efforts on the most prominent Therapeutic Area Tissues, such as CNS, metabolic disorders, and inflammatory disease. By combining these resources with expertise in pathology, tissue quality control, and immunohistochemistry, LifeSpan can provide full service localization profiling, without requiring the client to source difficult to obtain reagents.

[LifeSpan Tissues] [LifeSpan TMAs] [Supplied Tissues] [Tissue Procurement]

LifeSpan's In-House Tissue Bank
With more than 2 million formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded samples, LifeSpan has one of the largest on-site collections of normal and diseased human tissues in the industry. This resource provides LifeSpan with the range of samples necessary to pinpoint gene expression specific to a given disease and stage. LifeSpan's tissue bank is comprised of tissues from all major organ systems, including samples representing more than 1,500 diagnostic categories. Specimens are in the form of both formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded specimens as well as fresh frozen. In addition to human tissues, LifeSpan has gathered a comprehensive collection of normal primate specimens, as well as other specimens from common animal models such as mouse, rat, and dog.

Therapeutic Area Tissues
By focusing our efforts on maintaining an inventory of major therapeutic area tissues, LifeSpan ensures its ability to quickly satisfy the needs of its drug discovery clients. For each therapeutic area, the following lists of commonly requested normal and diseased tissues have been defined. LifeSpan endeavors to maintain an inventory of these tissues, or has established relationships through which they can be obtained. These materials are available for inclusion in contract research studies but are not representative of the entire LifeSpan collection. Many other tissue types and diseases are also available from LifeSpan's vast tissue repository.

Normal Tissues

Single Specimens and TMAs

All major organs

Toxicology Center

Single Specimens and TMAs

Mouse, Rat, Dog, Cynomolgus

Neurological Disease Center

Normal Specimens

All major brain regions
Mapped hippocampus, hypothalamus, amygdala

Diseased Specimens

Alzheimer's disease
Parkinson's disease
Multiple sclerosis
ALS
Glioblastoma, astrocytoma
Infarct

Inflammatory Disease Center

Single specimens
Inflammatory Disease Screens
Differential Expression Panels

Ulcerative Colitis Panel
Crohn's Disease Panel
Asthma Panel
COPD Panel
Allergic Rhinitis Panel
BPH Panel
Skin Disorder Panel
Rheumatoid Arthritis Panel
Lung Disease Panel

Oncology Disease Center

Single specimens and TMAs representing 6 major cancer types

Breast (IDC), Colon, Lung (NSC), Prostate, Pancreas, and Ovary

Focused Study Arrays and Panels

Multi-cancer screening TMAs
Single Cancer Prevalence TMAs (N=50)
Differential Expression Screens
Progression Panels

Cardiovascular Disease Center

Single Specimens
Screens and panels

Atherosclerosis Screen 1 (Coronary artery disease)
Atherosclerosis Differential Expression Panel
Heart Failure Differential Expression Panel
Human Cardiac Survey
Canine Cardiac Survey

Metabolic Disease Center

Single Specimens and Panels for:

Type II Diabetes Screen
Obesity Screen
Hypertension Screen

Tissue Cross-Reactivity Center

32+ Frozen Normal Tissue Types
(each from 3 non-related individuals)

Cynomolgus Tissue Screen
Human Tissue Screen

Tissue Microarrays

Tissue microarrays (TMAs) are a cost-effective and convenient resource that enables researchers to simultaneously study protein localization patterns in large numbers of normal and diseased tissues. LifeSpan offers many high quality TMAs for direct purchase or use in contract research studies. When using tissue microarrays, two critical factors need to be considered:

Will the specimen's size be sufficient to answer the biological question?
Are the elements of adequate quality for use in a study?

When designing a study, LifeSpan ensures that the tissues used will be adequate to answer the biological question being asked. For example, cancer TMAs would be insufficient when studying the angiogenesis associated with tumor development. When arrays are used in a study they are rigorously tested to ensure that each specimen was fixed appropriately, exhibits the defined pathology, and is antigenic when tested in immunohistochemistry using control antibodies. See a list of TMAs available for purchase or for use in LifeSpan contract services.

When applicable, LifeSpan will prepare Custom Tissue MicroArrays using client supplied materials in order to increase study efficiencies. Such custom arrays are particularly useful when conducting regular screening of standard samples, such as in-house animal models, xenografts, and cell line libraries.

Supplied Tissues

LifeSpan often conducts contract research studies using tissue materials supplied by the client or procured from other commercial resources. Studies are often strengthened by the inclusion of over-expressing cell lines (when available) as antibody characterization positive controls. Human tissues, non-human tissues, and cell lines can be supplied in fixative for paraffin embedding or as prepared paraffin blocks.

An increasing number of TMAs have become available commercially, however, quality may vary from vendor to vendor. These reagents can be powerful tools for localization profiling, but care must be taken during interpretation to ensure accuracy of results. LifeSpan welcomes the use of such commercial tissue resources in its contract research studies and offers its extensive molecular pathology expertise to ensure that the quality of these materials is such that we would be able to provide reliable immunohistological data.

Tissue Procurement Services

In the event that specific tissue specimens are not immediately available from LifeSpan's internal tissue bank, Lifespan has the ability to procure these materials on a prospective basis. The relationships that LifeSpan has developed with external resources allows for timely tissue procurement, often at a preferred price. Tissue procurement is available only in conjunction with the execution of contract research services.