Human Skin Disease Resource Center Core
The goal of this Center is to accelerate human skin disease research by providing researchers at any institution with access to human specimens and cutting edge analytic techniques. The services provided by this center are many and complex but can be broken down most easily into 2 categories – 1) HSDRC Human Tissues Biobank and 2) Analytic techniques.
The Human Tissues Biobank provides access to over 23,000 highly characterized consented patients and over 1.5 million banked pathologic specimens, both searchable by diagnosis, as well as to fresh human skin, purified cell populations from human skin and immunodeficient mice grafted with human skin and blood.
We provide four cutting edge analysis techniques. Mass cytometry by time of flight (CyTOF) on single cell suspensions allows evaluation of 45 different markers in a single sample with no signal overlap. High throughput TCR sequencing (HTS) allows one step comprehensive profiling of T cells in tissues and the ability to identify and track pathogenic T cell clones. Tyramide-based six color immunostaining microscopy with spectral imaging and automated image analysis provides the equivalent of flow cytometry data on cell types in formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissue sections. NanoString analyses provide accurate, quantitative RNA and DNA analyses of up to 800 targets in FFPE biopsies. Taken together, tyramide-based six color immunostaining and NanoString allow comprehensive protein and gene expression profiling for the first time in FFPE samples.
