The Etiology and Progression of Brain Tumors - Molecular Genetic Changes and Heredity

Aims of the study:

1. To collect adequate brain cancer tissue material for high throughput morphological, protein, RNA and DNA analyses.
2. To combine tissue-related results of these analyses with clinical data to examine the potential of the new biomarkers to assess diagnosis, prognosis and heredity of brain tumors.

Materials and Methods

Paraffin-embedded tumor material

Paraffin blocks of more than 4,000 brain tumours have been collected into the Laboratory of Pathology at Tampere University Hospital (Department of Pathology in Fimlab Laboratory). They have been used primarily for purposes of clinical diagnosis, but once patient or authority consent has been obtained the surplus of the material can be used for research purposes. A neuropathologist has marked the most representative region of each tumour in a tissue slide. Using these markings, tumour tissue regions are then biopsied into the tissue microarray block (Micro-Array Technology, Beecher Instruments, Inc.). Up to 1,000 histological samples can be collected into one tissue microarray block, which can be cut into 200 tissue sections. These sections can be used in various kinds of analysis (immunohistochemistry, fluorescence and chromogene in situ hybridisation and other histological standings). Among the advantages of the method are its high capacity, potential for automation, limited damage to the original tissue block and optimised circumstances for molecular biological analyses. We produced the first Finnish TMA block in 1999. Until now up to 3000 different brain tumors have been sampled to our TMA:s of which 2000 gliomas and meningiomas are used for this study. The following provides examples of projects in which the method is used. Similar strategies are used in the present study: