The National Mesothelioma Virtual Tissue Bank is Coordinated by the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh.
Mesothelioma Tissue Resources Available for Your Research
The National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank (NMVB) is funded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in association with National Institutes of Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH) to provide mesothelioma biospecimens with clinical annotation to researchers. The Meso Foundation made the NMVB possible due to the advocacy efforts of the Foundation’s community.
The NMVB collects and distributes mesothelioma tumor tissue and blood samples to the research community from consented patients. The specimens are stored with de-identified clinical data so that investigators can search the study database to identify and request these materials. NMVB is the largest and most accessible resource for biospecimens donated by mesothelioma patients.
NMVB Biospecimen Availability:
There is a large collection of malignant mesothelioma pleural and peritoneal annotated biospecimens including paraffin, fresh frozen paraffin tissue, blood products, and five distinct tissue microarrays. The current information about NMVB collection can be obtained by visiting the NMVB public database interface.
All researchers may apply for the NMVB mesothelioma tissue resources
(academic or commercial, US or foreign)
SEARCH THE ONLINE PUBLIC DATABASE
Tissue Microarray (TMA)
The NMVB also has slides from mesothelioma TMA with associated clinical data. These TMA Samples come from five distinct sites including New York University Langone Medical Center (NYU-LMC), University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), University of Pittsburgh (U Pitt), Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI), and University of Maryland (UMd). TMAs include four distinct pleura mesothelioma cases and one peritoneal mesothelioma TMA.
The information provided for each case on the array includes over 25 data elements including: age at diagnosis, race, asbestoses exposure, tumor size, histologic type, TNM staging, grade, and vital status. De-identified information can also be provided in excel or xml format.
Investigators looking for samples can use the following search fields:
| Stage of Disease | Treatment Received |
| Histopathologic Type | Recurrence Info |
| Histopathologic Grade | Metastatic Disease |
| Availability of Normal Tissue | Follow-up Time |
| Vital status, Nodal status |
Consultation and Interpretive Services
The NMVB can provide consultative assistance in staining interpretation, scoring, and basic statistical analysis of NMVB TMA on a collaborative basis. These services are available from trained pathologists familiar with mesothelioma tissue microarray and immunohistochemical staining interpretation. In addition, consultation and planning for large-scale studies are available. For further details, please e-mail us at [email protected].
You can obtain biospecimens and/or data with a Letter of Intent to obtain research resources from NMVB https://mesotissue.org/specimens/.
Please e-mail [email protected] if you have any questions about our TMA or our large repository of paraffin-embedded and fresh-frozen mesothelioma tissue samples.
