Rapid routine
Ronny Drapkin, MD, PhD, directs the "living" bank of ovarian tumor tissue at Dana-Farber.
At the breast tumor bank, the procedure for handling new tissue samples has the urgency and carefulness of an archaeological discovery. Each morning, an assistant to Dr. Richardson reviews the day's schedule for breast cancer surgery at Brigham and Women's to estimate when each procedure will conclude and the excised (surgically removed) tissue will be available. When the tissue is ready, the assistant pages Dr. Richardson, who comes to the "frozen section" room next to the operating room. There she performs a pathological assessment of the specimen and collects tumor tissue and adjacent portions of normal breast tissue. The tissue is frozen to minus 20 degrees Celsius, packed in dry ice in a plastic cooler, and carried to Dr. Richardson's lab. Then it is embedded and wrapped in foil to prevent dehydration, labeled with a specimen number, and stored at minus 80 degrees. An assistant logs each sample onto a computer system, assigning it a number and location within the freezer. If the patient has consented, the specimen will also be linked to data (collected when the patient is seen in Dana-Farber clinics) on such matters as family history, treatment, and long-term outcome.
"The database makes it possible to locate tumor samples from patients who all received the same type of chemotherapy and/or hormonal therapy, or from patients who had a cancer recurrence," Dr. Richardson says. "It's a great way to tie the clinical aspects of breast cancers to the genetic variations within individual specimens."
The most frequent use of banked tissue is "gene activity" research. Investigators extract RNA (a chemical cousin of DNA and a prime indicator of gene activity) from tissue samples and scan it with microarray devices (also known as expression arrays or "gene chips") to determine which of thousands of genes are switched on within tumor cells. This approach is sometimes called "functional genomics." Such gene profiling makes it possible to discover how normal cell division becomes derailed, how genetic instructions differ from tumor to tumor, and how different types might best be treated.
Dr. Richardson works closely with all investigators who make "withdrawals" from the bank, helping them refine their research, make the best use of tumor samples, and interpret their results. She and her colleagues are also lead investigators of a number of studies. For example, she and Zhigang Wang, MD, PhD, published a study last year on chromosomal abnormalities in an aggressive malignancy called basal-like breast cancer.
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