Abstract SY29-02: The use of innovative prostate biopsy tissue print techniques for molecular genomic, epigenomic and gene expression studies
Authors: Gaston Sandra M. , Grizzle William E. , Kittles Rick , Hayek Jihad , Kolettis Peter N. , Rais-Bahrami Soroush , Nix Jeffrey , Gordetsky Jennifer , Adams George W. , Kearney Gary P. 
Published: August 2015

Cancer health disparities can arise from research studies that use biospecimens that are not representative of the populations affected by the disease. In biorepositories at research oriented hospitals that support molecular biomarker research, an under-representation of important clinical subpopulations can result from practices that govern conventional biorepository collection of discarded tissues from surgical specimens. In prostate cancer biorepositories, most of the frozen samples are obtained from radical prostatectomy (RP) specimens. However, tissue collections based on RP specimens do not include patients who are diagnosed with relatively advanced disease and treated with first-line hormonal and/or radiation therapy rather than surgery; African Americans are more likely than European Americans to be diagnosed with this type of advanced prostate cancer. Moreover, RP collections have a limited representation of patient groups that preferentially choose non-surgical treatment for organ confined prostate cancer; such a preference for non-surgical treatment has been observed for African American prostate cancer patients in many areas of the US. Our collaborative group utilizes innovative prostate biopsy tissue print techniques to obtain a more complete representation of the men who are being evaluated for prostate cancer, including the patients with a biopsy diagnosis of “no cancer” and prostate cancer patients who chose active surveillance or non-surgical treatment rather than radical prostatectomy. Prostate biopsy tissue prints consist of nitrocellulose blots collected from each of the fresh tissue cores as it is transferred from the biopsy needle. This nitrocellulose blotting step is simple, inexpensive and results in no compromise of the biopsy tissue for surgical pathology. We have used snap-frozen tissue prints as the source of prostate tissues for multiple biomarker studies, including array-based and sequence-based profiling techniques that require high quality DNA and RNA. Because prostate biopsy tissue prints are easily collected in an outpatient office setting, this approach has allowed us to expand the Birmingham Area Prostate Cancer Biorepository (BAPrCAR) to include a multi-center urology practice that serves large numbers of African Americans and performs prostate biopsies on over 2000 patients per year. Prostate biopsy tissue prints have also been important in our studies of molecular marker correlations of magnetic resonance image (MRI) defined criteria of prostate cancer suspicion; our goal is to optimize the use of MRI/ultrasound guided biopsies for both African American and European American patients who are considering active surveillance. We have successfully used prostate biopsy tissue print samples to characterize multiple molecular biomarkers in parallel, including ancestry informative SNPs, mRNA and miRNA transcripts, genomic mutations and DNA methylation-marker patterns. In summary, our experience demonstrates that biopsy tissue print techniques provide an innovative, practical approach to overcoming disparities in prostate cancer research by significantly expanding patient representation in the frozen biorepository collections used for molecular biomarker discovery and translational studies.

Citation Format: Sandra M. Gaston, William E. Grizzle, Rick Kittles, Jihad Hayek, Peter N. Kolettis, Soroush Rais-Bahrami, Jeffrey Nix, Jennifer Gordetsky, George W. Adams, Gary P. Kearney. The use of innovative prostate biopsy tissue print techniques for molecular genomic, epigenomic and gene expression studies. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2015 Apr 18-22; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2015;75(15 Suppl):Abstract nr SY29-02. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2015-SY29-02