Vice Chair for Translational Research Shannon McCall, MD co-authored an article published Aug. 30th in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics about the Cooperative Human Tissue Network’s (CHTN) 35th anniversary. CHTN was created by the National Cancer Institute in 1987 to support a coordinated national effort to collect and distribute high quality, pathologist-validated human tissues for cancer research.
Since then, the network has expanded to provide different types of tissue samples, blood and body fluid samples, immunohistologic and molecular sample preparations, tissue microarrays, and clinical datasets inclusive of biomarkers and molecular testing. From inception through the end of 2021, the network has distributed 1,375,041 biospecimens. In 2021, it served 889 active investigators.
In the article, CHTN Southern Division leader McCall (lead author), together with the other five CHTN Division leaders and NCI staff, cover the network’s 35-year history, breaking down the advances of the past 15 years, which included the shift from molecular biomarker testing of individual genes to panels of hundreds of genes to the increased use of whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing. They also discuss the steps they’re taking to optimize the representation of diverse communities among the distributed biospecimens. The Duke Cancer Institute features the news on its blog here. Read the article the paper published on Molecular Cancer Therapeutics here.