Attachment 2 Letter to PIs

DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES

N Public Health Service

Dear Principal Investigator,

The Epidemiology and Genomics Research Program in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) invites you to help improve the access to valuable human specimen resources collected through population-based studies by participating in the Population Sciences Biospecimen Catalog (PSBC). The PSBC is an expanded, searchable website that makes researchers aware of existing population-based biospecimen resources. The PSBC will list specimen biorepositories and also provide a link to those repositories. It does not recreate a separate resource database or control the inventory of specimens. Scientists can search the PSBC database, and request and retrieve a list of resources likely to distribute the specimens they are seeking. Additionally, summary level data will be automatically filtered into the NCI-wide Specimen Resource Locator (SRL - https://specimens.cancer.gov/).

Participating in the PSBC and the SRL will publicize the availability of your specimens and lead cancer research investigators directly to your resource. You should include only the specimens that you would like to advertise and distribute. You may indicate if specimens are available for a fee or available only through collaboration. The PSBC and SRL will help you operate your resource more efficiently by directly matching investigator to resource and reducing the number of inappropriate requests.

The availability of specimen resources is critical to increasing our fundamental understanding of the biology of cancer and to translating important research discoveries to clinical application. However, unless researchers can learn about resources available to them, the value of our various repositories will not be fully realized.

To enter information into the PSBC, open the web page: http://epi.grants.cancer.gov/cgen/ and click on the “Biospecimens” tab. From there you can create a login and either access an electronic Excel file template for you to enter the information or obtain instructions for creating an automated download of your data to be submitted via an API.

For further assistance or if you have additional questions, please email me at danielle.carrick@nih.gov.

Thank You,

Danielle M. Carrick, PhD, MHS

Epidemiology and Genomics Research Program, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, NCI, NIH

9609 Medical Center Drive

Rockville, MD 20892