Purpose: To determine the efficacy of IL-5 inhibitory therapy in severe, refractory asthma in a real-world clinical setting from a tertiary referral center.
Methods: A retrospective chart review of patients with severe asthma treated with IL-5 biologic therapy for ≥ 6 months at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota between January 1, 2013 and August 31, 2019.
Results: Over the study period, we identified 63 patients with a mean age of 54 who received an IL-5 inhibitor for ≥ 6 months.
An increased need for specimens of reliable and consistent quality for research purposes requires the development of standardized policies and practices for the collection, handling, storage, retrieval, and distribution of specimens and specimen-related data. Providers of specimen resources should strive to incorporate new technologies and state-of-the-science approaches and thus ensure the availability of fit-for-purpose research specimens. Strategies to achieve quality outcomes and performance improvements often include adherence to established standards and implementation of best practices.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Family history is associated with gliomas, but this association has not been established for benign brain tumors. Using information from newly diagnosed primary brain tumor patients, we describe patterns of family cancer histories in patients with benign brain tumors and compare those to patients with gliomas.
Methods: Newly diagnosed primary brain tumor patients were identified as part of the Ohio Brain Tumor Study.
Background: Synoptic reporting, either as part of the pathology report or replacing some free text component incorporates standardized data elements in the form of checklists for pathology reporting. This ensures the pathologists make note of these findings in their reports, thereby improving the quality and uniformity of information in the pathology reports.
Methods: The purpose of this project is to develop the entire set of elements in the synoptic templates or "worksheets" for hematologic and lymphoid neoplasms using the World Health Organization (WHO) Classification and the College of American Pathologists (CAP) Cancer Checklists.
Background: Shared Pathology Informatics Network (SPIN) is a tissue resource initiative that utilizes clinical reports of the vast amount of paraffin-embedded tissues routinely stored by medical centers. SPIN has an informatics component (sending tissue-related queries to multiple institutions via the internet) and a service component (providing histopathologically annotated tissue specimens for medical research). This paper examines if tissue blocks, identified by localized computer searches at participating institutions, can be retrieved in adequate quantity and quality to support medical researchers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The Pennsylvania Cancer Alliance Bioinformatics Consortium (PCABC, http://www.pcabc.upmc.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Advances in molecular biology and growing requirements from biomarker validation studies have generated a need for tissue banks to provide quality-controlled tissue samples with standardized clinical annotation. The NCI Cooperative Prostate Cancer Tissue Resource (CPCTR) is a distributed tissue bank that comprises four academic centers and provides thousands of clinically annotated prostate cancer specimens to researchers. Here we describe the CPCTR information management system architecture, common data element (CDE) development, query interfaces, data curation, and quality control.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The Cooperative Prostate Cancer Tissue Resource (CPCTR) is a consortium of four geographically dispersed institutions that are funded by the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) to provide clinically annotated prostate cancer tissue samples to researchers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding the role of pathology informatics in patient safety entails an introduction to terminology and projects that have represented efforts to date in this area. The authors provide a short alphabetized introduction to several "buzzwords" and terms related to tools and processes that are used by health care research experts and workers involved in patient safety initiatives. The authors also include short descriptions of key health care research and patient safety projects that are relevant to pathology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFModern, molecular bio-medicine is driving a growing demand for extensively annotated tissue bank specimens. With careful clinical, pathologic and outcomes annotation, samples can be better matched to the research question at hand and experimental results better understood and verified. However, the difficulty and expense of detailed specimen annotation is well beyond the capability of most banks and has made access to well documented tissue a major limitation in medical re-search.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The Cooperative Prostate Cancer Tissue Resource (CPCTR) is a National Cancer Institute-supported tissue bank that provides large numbers of clinically annotated prostate cancer specimens to investigators. This communication describes the CPCTR to investigators interested in obtaining prostate cancer tissue samples.
Experimental Design: The CPCTR, through its four participating institutions, has collected specimens and clinical data for prostate cancer cases diagnosed from 1989 onward.