Jacinta Small, a research technician, removes a
rack of boxes containing tissue samples from
one of the lab’s freezers.

A Time Capsule for Tumors

A Treasury Like No Other, NYU Langone’s Tissue Bank Preserves Specimens in the Hope of Saving Lives

“We have a specimen,” announced Joan Durbin, MD, PhD, director of NYU Langone Medical Center’s Tissue Acquisition and Banking Services (TABS), an integral component of the Department of Pathology, Office of Collaborative Science, and NYU Langone Medical Center’s Cancer Institute. She hurried down a long hallway, up two flights of stairs, and into Tisch Hospital, then down another hallway and up another flight of stairs to the gross pathology laboratory.

This mad dash is all in a day’s work for Dr. Durbin and her staff. Their mission is to collect and preserve tissue for research. That means being in the OR as soon as tissue, such as a tumor, is removed from a patient, and running it to the pathology lab as quickly as possible. “Cells start to degrade quickly,” Dr. Durbin explains, including the fragile genetic material, DNA and RNA, that may hold the key to understanding cancer and other diseases.

Degraded specimens have long been a major problem for tissue banks. All too often, researchers retrieve preserved samples of tissue, only to find that the genetic material and cell structures they want to examine have deteriorated. “The minute cells are deprived of oxygen,” explains co-director Cynthia Loomis, MD, PhD, “they start responding to that stress, sometimes shutting down the genes we need to study.”

Dr. Durbin, associate professor of pathology, reached the gross pathology lab by the time the specimen (a suspicious thyroid) had arrived. After the pathologist examined the gland, he handed a small piece of it to Nellie Ziguridis, the lab manager, who placed it in a plastic mold and lowered it into a bath of dry ice and methyl butane. Within a minute, it was frozen.

The next step was to get the sample into one of the freezers in the tissue bank, where it will remain until the pathologist—no longer in need of it for diagnosis—releases it for banking. “The most important thing is the patient’s diagnosis,” Dr. Durbin explains. “We don’t bank any tissue until the diagnosis is confirmed and the sample is released.”

Once the doctors give the go-ahead to bank the specimen, technicians log the sample into their database and move it to a large tank of liquid nitrogen for permanent storage at –196° C. When possible, samples of healthy tissue from each patient are also stored for the purpose of comparison. Mostly, the samples are from tumors, but many other types of diseased tissues as well as serum are also preserved for researchers studying various diseases. To date, the bank contains 17,000 samples from 4,000 patients, each of them bar-coded.

“We now have easy access to a large number of high-quality samples,” says William Carroll, MD, director of the Cancer Institute and an ardent proponent of routine tissue banking. “Those samples will help us understand what makes some people predisposed to tumors, and will allow the discovery of those biological pathways essential for tumor growth so that they can be targeted by new agents.”

Having preserved tissues, both healthy and abnormal, from many different patients with the same disease enables researchers to scrutinize the genetic behavior of cells before and after they go awry. They can compare genes and their pattern of expression (how and why they “turn on,” or become active) for a given disease. These large tissue collections are invaluable for this kind of genetic research, known as genomics, in which patterns of gene expression are identified and linked to specific diseases.

Some researchers are also using lasers to carve out single cells from archived samples. They can then study them in greater detail than ever before through genetic and genomic analysis. “We’re getting close to deciphering the genetic blueprint for cancer in extraordinary detail,” explains Dr. Carroll, “and this information will allow us to personalize therapy for individual patients.”