The Washington University DDRCC is integrated with the NIH's Clinical Translational Science Award (CTSA) sponsored Washington University Institute of Clinical Translational Sciences (ICTS), primarily through the Clinical Component ofthe DDRCC and the ICTS Centerfor Biomedical Informatics. The DDRCC Clinical Component is primarily focused on providing investigators with access to clinical samples for digestive diseases related research. The collection and maintenance of clinical samples linked to longitudinal clinical information in a manner that is responsive to our DDRCC investigators, requires a high level of clinical expertise in accurately phenotyping the patient subjects and a high level of stringent oversight in collecting clinical samples. For this reason, organization of tissue procurement at this institution has moved away from a single monolithic institutional unit attempting to collect a broad array of clinical samples from patients with many different diseases. Instead, tissue procurement is being conducted by smaller disease focused units, such as the DDRCC sponsored facility, that are linked to each other by a common biomedical informatics platforms (Tissue Suite and ClinPortal) developed and maintained by the CTSA-sponsored Center for Biomedical Informatics. Furthermore, the data output from two of the Research Core Facilities, the Functional Genomics Core and the Proteomics Core are in the process of being uploaded to databases (Profile DB) maintained by the ICTS Center for Biomedical Informatics.