Dr Trina Yeadon on behalf of the BioResource Management Committee and the State Node Coordinators for the Australian Prostate Cancer BioResource

Significance: The vision of Australian Prostate Cancer BioResource (APCB) is to provide a unique quality assured facility for the collection, storage and access to tissue to support research into the treatment and improved clinical management of men with prostate cancer. The APCB manages four federated nodes located in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

The APCB is jointly funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (PCFA).  

Results: The APCB provides a significant number of unique services which include :

 ·         fresh tissue (cancer/”benign” cores) from radical prostatectomies;

·         paraffin embedded tissue sections,

·         buffy coat cells, serum, plasma

·         tissue microarrays

To date the APCB has collected 110,496 samples from 4,379 men (Oct 2005-March 2013) and has distributed 4,185 samples to 41 different researcher groups on 70 occasions (since 2007).

The APCB is firmly embedded in translational prostate cancer research within Australia and importantly has provided resources to build and contribute Australasian cohorts in large scale genetic, genomic and proteomic biomarkers studies. This includes the following research programs; PRACTICAL Genome Wide Association Study, Irish Biomarker Consortium, International Cancer Genome Consortium, and the highly publicised Movember Global Action Plan initiative.

Our alliance with the ANZUP Clinical Trial group has facilitated an agreement with the clinical trial sponsor TROG, to provide expertise and infrastructure to bank samples from the Phase III multi-centre RAVES trial. As the APCB has collection nodes distributed nationally we are perfectly placed to fully support and collaborate with all major clinical trials for men with prostate cancer within Australia. In addition the APCB has established a foundation to support long term clinical follow up studies – vital in the case of prostate disease due to its long natural history of disease progression.

Conclusions: The APCB has a collection of high quality prospectively collected prostate cancer tissue with clinical and pathological data acquired at diagnosis and surgery. The APCB is a critical component of ANZUP by providing biobanking for biological sub studies of current and future clinical trials for prostate cancer.