Cores
Three cores provide vital support services for the Mayo Clinic Breast Cancer SPORE.
Administrative Core
The Administrative Core serves as the organizational hub of the SPORE. It provides organizational and communications support for SPORE leadership, research projects, scientific cores, the Developmental Research Program and the Career Enhancement Program.
Specifically, the Administrative Core:
- Maximizes breast cancer translational research by providing leadership and oversight of the SPORE research projects and cores.
- Facilitates activities of the SPORE Executive Committee by organizing meetings and developing material related to oversight and programmatic development.
- Organizes meetings of the SPORE's Breast Advocacy Advisory Committee and facilitates collaborations between the committee and advocates at other SPOREs.
- Organizes scientific meetings and meetings of the SPORE's Scientific Advisory Committee, the External Advisory Committee, the Operations Committee and key personnel.
- Provides administrative support to the directors of the Developmental Research Program and Career Enhancement Program.
- Coordinates and facilitates investigator participation in National Cancer Institute (NCI) translational science meetings and the Translational Breast Cancer Research Consortium.
- Monitors, manages and coordinates fiscal activities.
- Serves as a liaison among the Breast SPORE, the NCI, Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center and Mayo Clinic.
- Identifies and facilitates development of collaborations among other breast cancer SPOREs.
- Prepares reports about SPORE activities, including annual progress reports and the competitive grant renewal application.
- Coordinates visiting scientists.
Core leadership
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Matthew P. Goetz, M.D.
Director
Breast Advocacy Advisory Committee
The Administrative Core includes the Breast Advocacy Advisory Committee. The Breast Cancer SPORE is fortunate to have this group of advocates with a strong commitment to SPORE advocacy in breast cancer.
These advocates play a crucial role in the SPORE. The committee's vision is to bring the patient voice to the research table and to help researchers reach patient communities. The committee ensures that the patient perspective is integrated into all aspects of SPORE research, including assigning patient advocates to each research project.
Contact: breastsporeadvocacy@mayo.edu
Cynthia Chauhan
Committee chair
Mary Lou Smith
Committee co-chair
Biospecimens and Pathology Core
The Biospecimens and Pathology Core provides investigators with biospecimens, pathology annotations, histological services and pathology support for SPORE research projects and other breast cancer translational research projects.
Biospecimens include:
- Frozen tissue.
- Archived formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue.
- Tissue microarrays, cell line microarrays and cryopreserved tissue.
- Blood.
- Plasma.
- Serum.
- DNA.
- RNA.
The Biospecimens and Pathology Core within the SPORE is supported by two Mayo Clinic institutional cores. The Biospecimen Accessioning and Processing Core processes blood to genomic DNA, serum and plasma aliquots. The Pathology Research Core provides histology-related services, including paraffin and frozen sectioning; immunohistochemistry; antibody optimization and characterization; tissue microarray construction; and digital imaging.
The Biospecimens and Pathology Core also:
- Obtains patient informed consent for blood and tissue specimens.
- Abstracts patient clinical data into a secure database, including demographics, tumor stages, treatments and clinical outcomes.
- Provides clinically annotated tissue specimens for clinical and translational research within the Breast Cancer SPORE.
The core's pathologist provides immunohistochemistry interpretations. These functions are essential to most translational research, including the specific projects included in the Breast Cancer SPORE.
Core leadership
Peter C. Lucas, M.D., Ph.D.
Co-Director
Mark E. Sherman, M.D.
Co-Director
Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Patient Registry Core
The Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Patient Registry Core provides SPORE investigators with the opportunity to collaborate with other researchers who have statistical and bioinformatics expertise along with breast cancer content knowledge.
These collaborations may include the development of study designs and analysis plans to evaluate research hypotheses that ensure:
- The issue of confounding factors is addressed.
- Reliable and reproducible measurement techniques are used.
- Emerging scientific insights are incorporated into ongoing studies
- A sufficient number of patients, specimens and animal models are used to draw conclusions.
The care in which studies are designed, conducted, analyzed and interpreted impacts whether or not the results are seen as providing insights that should be acted on and further built on.
The core also oversees the maintenance and expansion of the breast cancer registry. This registry provides SPORE researchers access to diagnostic, treatment and outcome data of well-defined cohorts of patients with in situ and invasive breast cancer.
Core leadership
Krishna R. Kalari, Ph.D.
Co-Director
Vera Suman, Ph.D.
Co-Director
David M. Zahrieh, Ph.D.
Co-Investigator
