Real-time analysis
In ovarian cancer, the urgent need for better treatments – particularly for women with advanced disease – led DFCI's Ronny Drapkin, MD, PhD, to propose a new approach to the classic method of banking tissue. Instead of collecting and storing surgical tumor samples for later study – when it is known whether the patient's tumor responded to treatment – Dr. Drapkin wants to analyze these samples right away.
"I think we owe it to patients to begin studying their tissue today," Dr. Drapkin says. "There's no reason we can't use this tissue in real time."
That belief led him and his colleagues John Quackenbush, PhD, and Ursula Matulonis, MD, of Dana-Farber and Daniel Cramer, MD, of Brigham and Women's Hospital, to create the "living" tissue bank for ovarian tumor tissue. When an ovarian cancer patient is scheduled to undergo surgery at BWH, Dr. Drapkin is notified by pager, and he or a technician collects the tissue. They immediately send the sample to a lab where DNA, RNA, and cell proteins can be extracted to determine the tumor's basic identity. If the sample is large enough, cells are taken out, grown in laboratory cultures, and analyzed for substances that may serve as "biomarkers" for early tumor detection. Additional tissue may be implanted in laboratory mice to help scientists study how the disease develops in humans.
"We compile data as each new case comes in, so we don't have to wait until there are 50 samples to begin an analysis," Dr. Drapkin explains. Each sample is annotated, its clinical and genetic features recorded. "We're developing a platform where all the information relating to these samples is coordinated, so we can study tumor types with similar characteristics."
The system is being used in a study of the molecular roots of drug resistance in ovarian cancer (see related story: Fingerprinting drug resistance in ovarian cancer in this issue). "There hasn't been a new drug for this disease in more than a decade," Dr. Drapkin observes. "We're putting the resources and procedures in place to make discoveries happen."
Readers who are interested in learning more about tissue banking can request a DVD and booklet by visiting: www.dana-farber.org/tissue_banking.
