Answers in the blood
The bank of blood samples for breast cancer research has a similarly broad range of scientific clientele. More than two dozen studies are currently making use of its holdings.
The specimens, housed at Dana-Farber, belong to two main categories. Most are collected from patients newly diagnosed with breast cancer. The second group comes from people – patients and others – who visit the Friends of Dana-Farber Cancer Risk and Prevention Clinic and have a family background of the disease. As at the breast tumor bank, technicians store samples, keep a database of patient information, and distribute samples to investigators as needed.
The bank staff is also responsible for collecting and processing blood from many patients participating in clinical trials of new therapies. Samples are analyzed for a variety of blood components that indicate the effectiveness or toxicity of treatments under study.
Among the research projects currently being supported by the blood bank are a study of a novel schedule for giving chemotherapy, a search for gene abnormalities in breast tumors that have spread to other parts of the body, and a hunt for factors that may influence an inherited risk for breast cancer.
"It's rewarding knowing that the bank may aid the discovery of new 'biomarkers' for early-stage breast cancer or determine the effectiveness of a new therapy," says the bank's director, Penelope Miron, PhD. "Our goal is to have the bank used to its full potential."
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