William Check, PhD The Commonwealth Technology Research Fund
issued a grant three years ago to establish the Cancer Genomics
Project, a collaboration between two Virginia
universities—Virginia Commonwealth and George Mason—and Inova, a
major health care provider in Virginia. The partnership’s focus
was the development of new diagnostic tools, such as
microarrays, for use in patients with cancer. This project
started a tissue-acquisition system involving banking of
residual tissue samples for isolation of DNA, RNA, and protein
for further analysis, including gene expression microarrays.
"For microarray analysis of RNA you need excellent quality
material," says Catherine I. Dumur, PhD, assistant professor in
the Department of Pathology at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Her role in the project was to determine what processes produce
high sample quality. Of course, the first requirement is high-
quality tissue, which is obtained by quick freezing after
removal from the body. Moreover, tumor tissue samples shoul