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Tissue-Based Research in Kidney Cancer: Current Challenges and Future Directions

Authors' Affiliations: ¹ Department of Pathology, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Department of Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; ² BIDMC Genomics Center; and ³ Division of Hematology/Oncology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; ⁴ Urologic Oncology Branch, Center for Cancer Research; ⁵ Laboratory of Pathology; and ⁶ Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland; ⁷ Departments of Laboratory Medicine and Urology, Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California; ⁸ Department of Pathology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York; ⁹ Department of Radiology, University Hospitals of Cleveland and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio; ¹⁰ Department of Pathology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California; ¹¹ Department of Pathology, Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, Park Ridge, Illinois; ¹² Science Applications International Corporation-Frederick, Inc., National Cancer Institute at Frederick, Frederick, Maryland; ¹³ Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis, National Cancer Institute; and ¹⁴ Organ Systems Branch, National Cancer Institute, Rockville, Maryland

Requests for reprints: Sabina Signoretti, Department of Pathology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115. Phone: 617-525-7437; Fax: 617-264-5169; E-mail: ssignoretti{at}partners.org.

The past several years have seen unprecedented advances in the application of various therapeutic strategies for the treatment of patients with renal cancer. The availability of active immunotherapy, antiangiogenic therapy, and targeted therapy for this disease has brought front and center issues related to choosing the appropriate treatment for particular patient populations. It is increasingly evident that the most promising treatment selection strategies will incorporate identifying specific features of the tumor itself. To facilitate this move toward personalized medicine, it is critically important to establish some standard principles for renal cancer tissue collection, preparation, and analysis for translational research studies. In this article, we identify and discuss some critical issues related to tissue-based kidney cancer research. We focus on five major areas as follows: (a) surgical and image-guided techniques for tissue collection; (b) quality control of specimen collection, processing, storage, and review; (c) issues related to analysis of paraffin embedded tissues; (d) genomic studies; and (e) assessment of reproducibility of assays across institutions. In addition, some practical implementation strategies are proposed. Although many of the topics discussed are specific for renal cancer, several are also relevant to tissue based biomarker investigations in a broad array of malignancies.