Research Tissue Banks (RTBs), Clinical Data Linkage and Translational Research

Research tissue banks are pivotal in translational research, underpinning research ranging from biomarker discovery to identification of novel therapeutic targets and providing insight into the underlying pathophysiology.  Critical to this is linkage with relevant clinical data including outcome, and the ability to integrate outputs from the various analyses (genomics, proteomics etc) undertaken on the samples across multiple local, national and international projects.

Overall Exemplar 4 has two key objectives:

• To use renal (cancer, transplant complications, acute kidney injury) and urological diseases as the exemplar for clinical translational research data needs in terms of developing a unified structure to support the broader informatics needs of the Leeds Multidisciplinary RTB (renal, urological, brain, colorectal, ovarian), the Leeds NIHR Biomarker RTB (renal) and with extension to other similar resources in Leeds involving breast cancer and aortic aneurysms.
• To provide data storage capacity and allow the development of bioinformatic pipelines and integration of proteomic, genomic, metabolomic and transcriptomic datasets derived from samples in these RTBs either in standalone studies or generated within national or international consortia.

Prof Rosamonde Elizabeth Banks and RTB-related leads (Muhonen, Selby, Knowles, Short, Jayne, Bell).