Preanalytics and Tissue Stewardship: Controlling the Molecular Integrity of Patient Samples

Carolyn Compton, MD, PhD, is an academic pathologist specializing in gastrointestinal disease and is board certified in both anatomic and clinical pathology. She received her MD and PhD degrees at the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is a Professor of Life Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU), a Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine, and an adjunct Professor of Pathology at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. She is the Chief Medical Officer of the National Biomarker Development Alliance, and an Affiliated Scholar at the ASU Center for Healthcare Delivery and Policy. She is the Medical Director of the ASU Biodesign Clinical Testing Laboratory doing testing for SARS-CoV-2 in Arizona. Dr. Compton is a former Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Gastrointestinal Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Pathologist-in-Chief of the Boston Shriners Children’s Hospital. She served as the Chair of the Pathology Committee of Cancer and Leukemia Group B Clinical Trials Group for 15 years. She has served as the CEO and President of the Critical Path Institute (2012), and from 2005-2011, she serves as the Director of the Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research and the Director of the Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies (IMAT) program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Prior to going to the NCI, Dr. Compton was the Strathcona Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathology at McGill University and Pathologist-in-Chief of the McGill University Health Center from 2000-2005. While in Canada, she served as the Chair of the Pathology Committee of the Canadian Clinical Trials Group. She is a past Chair of the Cancer Committee of the College of American Pathologists and the immediate past Chair of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC). 

Currently, she is the Chair of the Precision Medicine Core of the AJCC and the Chair of the Preanalytics for Precision Medicine Project Team of the College of American Pathologists. She serves on the United States Technical Advisory Group to the International Standards Organization and the Scientific and the Scientific and Ethical Advisory Board of BBMRI of the European Research Infrastructure Consortium. She is a member of the BloodPAC initiative, formerly known as the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot. She serves as the editor-in-chief of Current Pathobiology Reports, a Nature journal. This year, her latest textbook entitled Cancer, The Enemy from Within; A Comprehensive Textbook of Cancer’s Causes, Complexities and Consequences was published by Springer Nature, and she was a recipient of the Team Science Award of the American Association of Cancer Research for her seminal work on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project jointly sponsored by the NCI and the National Human Genome Research Institute. Her current research interests focus on colorectal cancer, medical prediction modeling, biospecimen and biobanking science, and biomarker development. She has authored more than 500 scientific manuscripts, review articles, books, chapters, and abstracts.