Neoadjuvant Therapy in Rectal Cancer - Biobanking of Preoperative Tumor Biopsies.

Translational research relies on high-quality biospecimens. In patients with rectal cancer treated preoperatively with radiochemotherapy tissue based analyses are challenging. To assess quality challenges we analyzed tissue samples taken over the last years in a multicenter setting. We retrospectively evaluated overall 197 patients of the CAO/ARO/AIO-94- and 04-trial with locally advanced rectal cancer that were biopsied preoperatively at the University Medical Center Goettingen as well as in 10 cooperating hospitals in Germany. The cellular content of tumor, mucosa, stroma, necrosis and the amount of isolated DNA and RNA as well as the RNA integrity number (RIN) as quality parameters were evaluated. A high RNA yield (p = 2.75e-07) and the content of tumor (p = 0.004) is significantly associated to high RIN-values, whereas a high content of mucosa (p = 0.07) shows a trend and a high amount of necrosis (p = 0.01) is significantly associated with RNA of poor quality. Correlating biopsies from Goettingen and the cooperating centers showed comparable tumor content results. By taking small sized biopsies we could assess a clear correlation between a good RNA quality and a high amount of RNA and tumor cells. These results also indicate that specimens collected at different centers are of comparable quality.

Architecture of a Biomedical Informatics Research Data Management Pipeline.

In University Medical Centers, heterogeneous data are generated that cannot always be clearly attributed to patient care or biomedical research. Each data set has to adhere to distinct intrinsic and operational quality standards. However, only if high-quality data, tools to work with the data, and most importantly guidelines and rules of how to work with the data are addressed adequately, an infrastructure can be sustainable. Here, we present the IT Research Architecture of the University Medical Center Göttingen and describe our ten years' experience and lessons learned with infrastructures in networked medical research.

Improving IT-Support for Biobank Users.

To improve IT-support for biobank users by the Department of Medical Informatics (MI) a questionnaire was designed addressing topics regarding the provided software and the IT-support. Different stakeholders of supported projects were identified and the interviews were performed with five users. The developed questionnaire consisted of five sections and 50 questions. The results of the interviews showed an overall satisfaction with the software and the support. Differences were identified between "long-term" and "short-term" users. Most improvements should be made in the usability of the software. Furthermore, the interviewees showed a great interest in a user-group to discuss and compare the functionalities and workflows of the different research groups. The results of the interviews will be used to make a prioritized list of improvements for the software. After validating the questionnaire users of the other IT-Systems provided by the MI will be interviewed.

The "DGPPN-Cohort": A national collaboration initiative by the German Association for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy (DGPPN) for establishing a large-scale cohort of psychiatric patients.

The German Association for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy (DGPPN) has committed itself to establish a prospective national cohort of patients with major psychiatric disorders, the so-called DGPPN-Cohort. This project will enable the scientific exploitation of high-quality data and biomaterial from psychiatric patients for research. It will be set up using harmonised data sets and procedures for sample generation and guided by transparent rules for data access and data sharing regarding the central research database. While the main focus lies on biological research, it will be open to all kinds of scientific investigations, including epidemiological, clinical or health-service research.