Laura Siminoff, PhD, Dean at the College of Public Health at Temple University, discusses best practices for communicating and obtaining consent from donor families based on experience from the Genotyping-Tissue Expression Project (GTEx). Dr. Siminoff was a key contributor to the project, launched in 2010 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which characterized genetic associations across 49 tissues from over 800 postmortem donors. Topics include:

• Why communication is essential when obtaining authorization from donor families
• What is required vs. recommended when authorizing tissue donation
• How the tissue donation and research consent was used for the GTEx project