What is the Australian Prostate Cancer BioResource (APCB)?
The APCB is four federated nodes located in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide and is now internationally recognised as a best practice prospective collection tissue bank.
There is a standardised clinical/pathology dataset which is collected for all patients at the time of recruitment.
The APCB also maintains a comprehensive clinical and specimen database at each node and development of an interactive central web based database is being planned.
Services and Recruitment of the APCB
A breakdown of the APCB collection is listed below:
- The APCB is a national resource and the 6,000 men who have participated have donated blood which has been fractionated and stored as 47,440 buffy coat cells; 42,635 serum samples and 43,760 plasma samples.
- For the 6,000 cases we have: 97% formalin fixed paraffin embedded blocks (5,820); 70% blood (4,200); 50% fresh frozen tissue (3,000) and 13,549 fresh frozen prostate cores.
The table below gives a snap shot of age at radical prostatectomy, pre-operative PSA and Gleason scores.
| Pre-Op PSA range (%) | Gleason range (%) | |||||||||
| Age at RP (years) | Patients (%) | Average Age at RP | <4 | 4-10 | >10 | <7 | 7 | 7 (3+4) | 7 (4+3) | >7 |
| <40 | 0.04 | 39 | 0.02 | 0.02 | 0.02 | 0.26 | 0.04 | 0.06 | 0 | 0 |
| 40-49 | 4 | 46 | 2 | 2 | 0.38 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| 50-59 | 28 | 56 | 6 | 18 | 4 | 5 | 22 | 16 | 6 | 2 |
| 60-69 | 53 | 65 | 6 | 38 | 10 | 5 | 42 | 28 | 13 | 7 |
| 70-79 | 15 | 72 | 1 | 10 | 4 | 1 | 11 | 6 | 5 | 2 |
| >80 | 0.02 | 80 | 0 | 0.02 | 0 | 0 | 0.04 | 0.06 | 0 | 0 |
| Overall | 100 | 60 | 14 | 68 | 19 | 12 | 78 | 54 | 24 | 11 |
Collaborations and Clinical Trials
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 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.