Common Biospecimen Coordination System and Informatics Infrastructure

A Request for Proposals (RFP) to support the development of a design plan and pilot project to establish a common biospecimen coordination system and informatics infrastructure for multiple NCI SPOREs in prostate cancer research was released on March 31, 2005. This system will facilitate biospecimen and data sharing among scientific investigators located at different institutions by supporting the use of common approaches for collecting, processing, storing, annotating and distributing high-quality biospecimens. Initially, this system will support a proposed Prostate SPORE biomarker validation study, but biospecimens and data collected for this system will ultimately be available to qualified non-SPORE researchers to generate accurate, comparable, and reproducible genomic, proteomic, and other types of data. For more information on this RFP, please visit http://rcb.cancer.gov/rcb-internet/appl/rfp/published_rfps.jsp.