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Issue link: https://clinicalomics.epubxp.com/i/853204
www.clinicalomics.com July/August 2017 Clinical OMICs 35 experiments. Fresh or frozen tissues, on the other hand, are much more expensive to handle and store, and require more specialized expertise to collect. "The paraffin blocks have been attractive because many academic [repositories] have warehouses full of blocks, so you can do a retrospective study pretty easily with them," Dr. Washington says. However, Michael Roehrl, director of the Precision Pathology Biobank- ing Center at Memorial Sloan Ket- tering Cancer Center (MSKCC), says that paraffin-embedded tissues have limited utility because these samples often come with fragmented genomes, altered proteomes and metabolomes, processing and fixation differences, and inherent biomolecular variabil- ity. This makes them suboptimal for certain applications, such as whole genome sequencing or protein phos- phorylation analysis, which requires "ultra-fresh, rapidly frozen tissues from an operating room where every- thing is controlled," he said. This is especially true for newly burgeoning fields of precision med- icine, such as immuno-oncology, a hot area of translational research that requires scientists to study not only the tumor itself, but also the surround- ing dynamic microenviroment and the patient's immune system. "One of the main reasons why we don't quite understand how immunotherapy actually works is because the thera- pies are on the market faster than an actual good precision assay to assess the functional changes induced by the therapy," Dr. Roehrl noted. "That's why there is an enormous interest to obtain samples from wide categories to characterize what's happening with patients on these therapies." Dr. Roehrl believes sample collec- tion should be driven by the under- lying scientific questions, rather than "collecting samples and later hoping for an idea of what to do with them." The main reason for this, he says, is that "the types of specimens, as well as how you acquire them and extract molecular information from them, Jackson Laboratory Expands Genomic Research into China The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) said it will expand into China through strategic clini- cal genomics research collaborations with the Wenzhou Municipal People's Govern- ment, Ouhai District People's Government (WZ), and Wenzhou Medical University and its affiliated hospitals (WMU), to con- duct research on the genomic causes of disease. WZ and WMU will form the Wenzhou Institute for Genomic Medicine (WIGM), which will conduct research under JAX's scientific direction and management. The WIGM will employ 200 faculty and staff in 15 anticipated research groups, JAX said. The collaboration will allow JAX to access the clinical experience and expertise of the medical university and its affiliated hospitals, while WMU gains access to JAX's research and scientific expertise. The JAX-Wenzhou collaboration will take place in two phases. In the first, a clinical research presence will be estab- lished on the campus of WMU and in the Life & Health Town of Ouhai District, Wenzhou, where approximately 50 to 70 new staff in six research groups will conduct research and clinical genomics. In the second phase, a standalone state- of-the-art facility will be built in Life and Health Town in the Ouhai District near WMU Affiliated Hospital #1, and will house both clinical genomics and mouse-based functional research laboratories. The 200,000-square-foot facility will be built as part of a new Health Industry Innova- tion Center, an R&D; incubator for the bio- medical industry. (continued on next page) While biorepostitories and commercial specimen-researcher matchmakers are working to improve access to biopspecimens, uniform and consistent clinical annotation remains a significant hurdle for researchers looking to gather multiple specimens from multiple sources. Mayo Clinic