The Tissue Acquisition and Banking Services (TABS) of the NYU Experimental Pathology Core Facilities is designed to coordinate sample acquisition, storage, and retrieval services for relevant human tissues. TABS personnel acquire fresh frozen specimens from the surgical pathology suite and formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) specimens from pathology archives, both from consenting patients, to be disbursed to investigators. The samples disbursed may be as pieces of fresh frozen tissue, frozen sections or unstained paraffin sections.

TABS provides microtomy of paraffin embedded samples and OCT embedding and cryosectioning of frozen human samples. Although TABS is currently focused on organ-specific programs at NYU Cancer Institute, it can acquire all types of tumors if requested by an investigator with an approved IRB protocol. NYU Cancer Institute currently operates five organ-specific tissue banks (breast, prostate, neuro-oncology, thoracic oncology, and melanoma), which provide an extensive inventory of well-annotated specimens.