Prostate Cancer SPORE Cores

• Arul M. Chinnaiyan, MD, PhD (Director)
• Ganesh S. Palapattu, MD (Co-Director)

The Michigan Prostate SPORE Administrative Core is responsible for the leadership, guidance, and management of the program. The Administrative Core oversees all aspects and performs numerous duties across the wide scope of the SPORE to support the translational goals of the investigators. The Core provides support and oversight to ensure that all investigators have IRB and animal approvals in place to conduct research. The Core will develop and maintain an advocacy portal for our prostate cancer patient community. Dr. Chinnaiyan is the Core Director and will be responsible for overall program organization and fiscal oversight as well as the Biostatistics/Bioinformatics and Biospecimen/Pathology Cores. Dr. Palapattu will serve as Co-Director of the Administrative Core and provide overall scientific oversight. Dr. Palapattu will be responsible for mentorship and development of collaborators and trainees, as well as oversight of clinical aspects of the SPORE. The Clinical Applications Committee within the Core will help to provide leadership in clinical trials and therapeutic oversight, patient advocacy, and minority community engagement. This Core provides the framework to support the success and mission of the Michigan Prostate SPORE as a cohesive group of investigators committed to supporting translational research in prostate cancer. The SPORE Administrative Core is guided by the following specific aims: 

Aim 1: Provide scientific, programmatic, and administrative leadership to all aspects of the SPORE. 

Aim 2: Develop, facilitate, and monitor progress of translational aims with project Co-Leaders. 

Aim 3: Identify, support, and facilitate scientific collaborations. The Administrative Core is charged with creating a culture of collaboration through fostering and helping to establish and maintain successful collaborations.

Aim 4: Facilitate communication between investigators and groups within the Michigan Prostate SPORE as well as with other institutional SPOREs, the SPORE network outside the University of Michigan, NCI, and investigators across the spectrum of translational cancer research. 

Aim 5: Perform fiscal and data management functions. 

Aim 6: Provide functional and ethical oversight to projects and cores and coordinate patient advocacy. 

• Alexander Tsodikov, PhD (Director)

The goal of the Biostatistics/Bioinformatics Core is to collaborate with SPORE investigators and other Core resource scientists to enhance the quality of the research undertaken in the Michigan Prostate SPORE. The Core personnel have been chosen because of their expertise in the relevant areas of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics that are specifically required for the SPORE projects to succeed. Support will be provided in all stages of the research, beginning with the formulation of the research question, through the experimental design stage and data collection stage, including genomic sequencing, data analysis, and interpretation, to the writing of reports and dissemination of results. Core personnel have played a significant role in designing the proposed experiments and planning the data analysis throughout the SPORE. In addition to direct support of the projects and other Cores, senior statisticians will also focus on statistical methodology development and the advancement of genomic/bioinformatic capabilities related to the needs of prostate cancer research in this SPORE. Together, this team of investigators will provide rigorous statistical and bioinformatics support to the Michigan Prostate SPORE to ensure the highest caliber of research studies and reported results. The specific aims of the Core are:

Aim 1: Assist investigators in the design of clinical, laboratory, and high-throughput genomic sequencing experiments.

Aim 2: Assist investigators in the analysis and interpretation of data from clinical and laboratory experiments, the processing and examination of high-throughput genomic datasets, and in writing of manuscripts relaying Michigan Prostate SPORE results to the scientific community.

Aim 3: Undertake translational biostatistics/bioinformatics research to develop methodology and software implementation relevant to prostate cancer including the development of algorithmic toolkits for emerging types of genomic assays and the adaptation/refinement of existing computational approaches to the needs of the Michigan Prostate SPORE.

• Lakshmi Priya Kunju, MD (Director)
• Rohit Mehra, MD (Director)

The overall goal of the Michigan Prostate SPORE Biospecimen/Pathology Core is to collect biological materials with associated clinical information to facilitate translational prostate cancer research. The Core places patient confidentiality and clinical care as a top priority. As a coordinated effort between pathology, urology, medical oncology, radiation oncology, and Michigan Prostate SPORE researchers, the Core has developed a unified informatics infrastructure that provides researchers with a wide range of annotated samples. The specific aims of the Core include:

Aim 1: Protection of patient welfare. The highest priority is given to ensure that no research protocol compromises pathology diagnosis or tumor staging.

Aim 2: Acquisition and processing of prostate tissues for research. The Core assures that the widest range of prostate tissues and derived biomolecules are available from various sources, including benign prostate tissue from patients without any known prostatic disease, clinically localized prostate cancer, and metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (Michigan Legacy Tissue Program).

Aim 3: High quality pathologic review of prostate tissues. Expert GU pathologists assure uniform review of prostate tissue samples.

Aim 4: Pathology consultation for the purpose of designing translational research projects. This service focuses on determining the types of tissues and amount required for the successful completion of the research projects.

Aim 5: Quality assessment of prostate tissues and clinical data. The Biospecimen/Pathology Core staff regularly evaluate frozen and formalin fixed tissues for adequacy.

Aim 6: Development of technology appropriate for pathology-based translational research. These technologies include novel targeted next-generation sequencing (NGS) methods, next-generation molecular profiling utilizing spatial transcriptomics (10X Genomics Visium), and novel prostate cancer-focused targeted NGS assays.

Aim 7: Provide support to ongoing clinical studies. The Core will continue to provide tissue procurement services and/or high-quality pathology reviews of specimens from patients enrolled in various clinical trials and studies.

Aim 8: Maintenance of clinical and pathology data with links to molecular studies. The Core will continue to expand the detailed clinical and pathology database conforming to the NCI’s Common Data Elements (CDE) guidelines, permitting queries between molecular findings and clinically relevant outcomes.