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 software is the second generation of the caTissue Clinical Annotation Engine (CAE) that was developed for the National Cancer Institute's caBIG™ program.

Testing is now underway on the MVB2.0 release, which will provide 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 686 annotated cases and 919 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.

group photo
The National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank Group

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 CDC