Mesothelioma Tissue Resources Available for Your Research

The National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank (NMVB) is a virtual biospecimen registry designed to support and facilitate basic science, clinical, and translational research that will advance understanding of mesothelioma pathophysiology with the goal of expediting the discovery of preventive measures, novel therapeutic interventions, and ultimately, cures for mesothelioma. The NMVB Data and Query tool is a Java based application designed using a Model-Driven Development framework. This approach begins with a UML class model which is then used to generate all the other aspects of the application from the data tables through to the User Interface components. The code was written and is supported by staff at the Department of Biomedical informatics at the University of Pittsburgh.

MVB database version 3.0 has been released that provides researchers real-time access to demographic, epidemiologic, pathologic, genotype, and follow-up data associated with biospecimens at no cost. Researchers interested in utilizing NMVB samples for their research may submit an application. All researchers (academic or commercial, United States or foreign) may apply for NMVB tissue specimens.

NMVB currently has 1092 annotated cases and 1361 biospecimens including:

Paraffin Embedded Tissue
Fresh Frozen Tissue
Blood and DNA Samples

The NMVB also has developed mesothelioma tissue microarrays (TMAs) with associated multimodal data annotation. Additional TMAs will be available shortly — please sign up for our mailing list if you would like to be notified when TMAs are available for order.

CDC Campus
CDC Campus Nov 7th 2011

SEARCH OUR ONLINE PUBLIC DATABASE* to determine whether the NMVB has the mesothelioma biospecimens you need for your research. Search fields include:

Stage of disease
Histopathologic type
Histopathologic grade
Availability of normal tissue
Vital status, nodal status
Treatment received
Recurrence info
Metastatic disease
Follow-up time

*(Database requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher)

Consultation and interpretive services are also available: trained pathologists can provide assistance in staining interpretation, scoring, and basic statistical analysis. In addition, consultation and planning for large-scale studies are available. For further details, please e-mail us.

Please e-mail us if you have any questions about our repository of paraffin-embedded, DNA and blood samples.

Funding for the National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank provided by NIOSH