Overview
Our mission is to provide specialized services and patient biosamples to the scleroderma research community to promote and facilitate research on systemic sclerosis.
The National Scleroderma Core Centers (or SScores) provide a framework for more rapid advances in understanding systemic sclerosis (SSc) pathogenesis by providing pathologic skin and lung samples, and advanced technologies, microarray gene expression and proteomics, to existing and new SSc investigators.
The Core Centers coordinate robust clinical data collection to empower pathological tissue analyses and application of advanced technologies, providing uniform clinical assessments, high level analytical capabilities and large sample numbers.
Thus, the Core Centers accelerate research into SSc pathogenesis by helping individual investigators in their research projects, fostering collaboration between investigators through utilization of core resources, and creating consortia data that will empower further clinical-translational insights.
What can the SScores do for me and my research?![Tower2 Tower2](/sscores/files/2011/09/Tower2-150x150.jpg)
Basic Interaction
- I need the Core to embed, cut and stain some skin tissues for me
- No samples from the core
- No clinical information
- CORE provides: access to below market cost services. No collaborative agreement is needed
Intermediate core interaction (I want to know if the gene/protein I study is important in scleroderma pathogenesis)
- Obtain scleroderma and control skin samples for analysis of your target protein from the DermPath Core, correlate with clinical data or
- Obtain lung pathology samples for analysis of your protein from the Lung Histopathology Core, correlate with clinical data or
- Obtain sera from the Proteomic Core for measuring expression of your protein, correlate with clinical data
Complete Interaction
- I am going to submit skin and/or blood samples to the cores
- I am going to submit associated clinical information
- I am going to use this as a vehicle to accelerate my discoveries in scleroderma
- I am going to anticipate consortia authorship on group publications ranging from proteomics, immunohistochemistry to clinical database analyses