A poster session at ASCO last week discussed a new MBC program - a database being collected of those with MBC to help learn more about them and find new treatment strategies.
"“Our goal is to understand the biology of metastatic breast cancer and find new treatment strategies,” Nikhil Wagle, MD, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute told the ASCO Daily News during the “Cancer Prevention, Genetics, and Epidemiology” Poster Discussion Session on June 6. “One of the ways we can do this is by creating a database of clinical information that is linked to genomic information for patients with metastatic breast cancer and share that with the world so that lots of researchers can use it to make discoveries.”
To increase the volume of tumor samples from women with this disease, the Metastatic Breast Cancer Project was designed to capture information from the vast majority of metastatic breast cancer tumors that are not available for research, largely because most patients are cared for in community settings where genomics studies are not conducted."
I think this is a great idea. Those who wish to participate are sent a saliva collection kit so they can provide a DNA sample and then they release their medical records and tumor information. They study then looks at outliers - those who best responded to certain treatments. But I am sure there is much more. I did find a link to the project's website.
I am elated to learn of this. The metastatic community has almost been ignored in most research. And this is a great step in the right direction.
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