The OVCARE Tissue Bank is housed within the Vancouver General Hospital Department of Pathology and the British Columbia Cancer Agency. This bank contains tumour samples from over 2100 patients. The tissue samples in the bank are collected from consenting patients following surgical excision and stored in a variety of forms, enabling the extraction of genetic material for analysis. Since 2007 there has been an effort to collect serum, plasma, and buffy coat for every case and since 2010 ascites has also been sampled, spun down and stored. In addition to providing research material for OVCARE researchers, the OVCARE Tumour Bank is shared with national and international research collaborators and has already contributed to over 60 national and international research projects.

This and other tissue banks provide the foundation for translational research in medicine. In order for these samples to be used by current technologies such as Illumina whole transcriptome sequencing, the samples must be of extremely high quality. We have currently sent a selection of our samples to The Cancer Genome Atlas Project for analysis and were told by researchers there that our samples were among the best quality that they had encountered around the world.