Innovative Technologies To Overcome Disparities In Prostate Cancer Research: Using Snap-Frozen Prostate Biopsy Tissue Prints To Expand Patient Representation In Biorepository Collections Used For Molecular Biomarker Research

Cancer health disparities can arise from research that uses biospecimens that are not fully representative of the populations affected by the disease. In biorepositories at research oriented hospitals that support biomarker research, an under-representation of important clinical subpopulations can result from practices that favor the collection of discarded tissues from surgical specimens. In prostate cancer biorepositories, frozen samples are usually obtained from radical prostatectomy (RP) specimens. However, collections based on RP specimens do not include patients who are diagnosed with relatively advanced disease and are treated with first-line hormonal and/or radiation therapy rather than surgery. Moreover, many RP collections have limited representation of patient groups that preferentially choose non-surgical treatment for organ confined disease; such a preference for non-surgical treatment has been observed for African American prostate cancer patients in some areas of the US. Our collaborative group utilizes prostate biopsy tissue print techniques to obtain a more complete representation of the men who are being evaluated for prostate cancer, including the patients with a biopsy diagnosis of “no cancer” and prostate cancer patients who chose active surveillance or non-surgical treatment rather than radical prostatectomy. Prostate biopsy tissue prints consist of nitrocellulose blots collected from each of the fresh tissue cores as it is transferred from the biopsy needle. This nitrocellulose blotting step is simple, inexpensive and results in no compromise of the biopsy tissue for surgical pathology. We have used snap frozen tissue prints as the source of prostate tissues for multiple biomarker studies, including array-based and sequence-based profiling techniques that require high quality DNA and RNA. Because prostate biopsy tissue prints are easily collected in an outpatient office setting, we have used this approach to expand the Birmingham Area Prostate Cancer Biorepository (BAPrCAR) to include a multi-center urology practice that serves large numbers of African Americans and performs prostate biopsies on over 2000 patients per year. Our BAPrCAR studies demonstrate that we can now effectively capture prostate biopsy samples from patients diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and can analyze each sample for multiple molecular biomarkers, including ancestry informative SNPs, mRNA and miRNA transcripts and DNA methylation-marker patterns. Citation Format: Sandra M. Gaston, Gary P. Kearney, Rick Kittles, Peter N. Kolettis, George W. Adams, William E. Grizzle. Innovative technologies to overcome disparities in prostate cancer research: Using snap-frozen prostate biopsy tissue prints to expand patient representation in biorepository collections used for molecular biomarker research. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2014 Apr 5-9; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2014;74(19 Suppl):Abstract nr 4710. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2014-4710