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.

Core Lab services:

Breast Tissue
The Breast Tissue Bank maintains tissue samples, a breast-cancer-specific database, and an anatomic pathology database.

Prostate Tissue
The Prostate Tissue Bank, part of the NCI Cooperative Prostate Cancer Tissue Resource (CPCTR), provides both fresh and paraffin-embedded prostate cancer and control tissues, with associated patient data.

Neuro-Oncology
The Neuro-Oncology Bank obtains and archive fresh tissue samples from patients for primary and recurrent disease as well as brain tissue from patients operated for intractable epilepsy, trauma or other non-malignant disorders.

Thoracic Oncology
The Thoracic Oncology Bank presently collects plasma, serum, matching tumor and normal specimens, and peripheral blood monocytes on all patients having thoracic-related operations.

Melanoma
The Melanoma Bank has developed a comprehensive database incorporating detailed clinical and pathologic information on patients with melanoma along with their tissue and blood specimens.

Custom Services: New services can be provided and existing services varied according to the needs of the research community.