title: RNASeq of tissue punches of homo sapiens: melanoma patients from clinical trial NCT02231775
design: Formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tumor tissue blocks from four melanoma BRAF/MEK inhibitor treated melanoma patients from the above cohort treated were used to build a tissue microarray (TMA) block using the ATA-100 Advanced Tissue Arrayer (Chemicon International) at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Tissue samples included in the TMA were from pretreatment, on-treatment or surgical resection time points. The TMA block included a total of 36 cores each measuring 1 mm in diameter. Multi-sampling of the tissue block was performed to account for intra tumoral heterogeneity. TMA slides were then assayed using the Nanostring GeoMx digital spatial profiler (DSP) and probed with the human melanoma morphology kit (Syto13, S100B and CD45) and the human whole transcriptome atlas (WTA) on a fee for service basis by Nanostring Technologies (Seattle, WA) performed at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Three regions of interest (ROI) were selected per tumor core to capture inter- and intra-tumor heterogeneity.