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For scientists studying prostate cancer, the contents of a certain room on the fourth floor of the Marburg Building hold more riches than Fort Knox. For in here, they believe, lie the answers to curing this disease — if they can just find the right questions to unlock them.
Welcome to the Biorepository — a treasure trove of freezers, whose contents represent the lives of nearly 4,500 men with all stages of prostate cancer. Neatly categorized, bar-coded, computerized, with demographic information including family history, and readily available to investigators throughout
the world, are close to 18,000 samples of blood and urine products.
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“It is a huge resource,” says Alan W. Partin, M.D., Ph.D., the David Hall McConnell Professor and Director of the Brady. “A scientist can go to our database, and say, ‘I need 300 specimens from African-American men between ages 50 and 60, treated between 2000 and 2004,’ and we can say, ‘Here you go.’ We have distributed nearly 5,400 aliquots (tiny samples) from these specimens to investigators throughout the world.”
The Biorepository is a Clinical Epidemiology and Validation Center for the Early Detection Research Network, funded by the National Cancer Institute for the developmentof “molecular diagnostics” — bio markers.
Neatly categorized, bar-coded, computerized, with demographic information including family history, and readily available to investigators throughout the world, are close to 18,000 samples from men with all stages of prostate cancer.
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There are only two other sites like it in the world; one is at Harvard, and the other at the University of Texas-San Antonio. The one here at Hopkins is the flagship, the biggest,the most utilized and comprehensive.
It has provided immense help, says Partin, for scientists working to develop numerous biomarkers for use in blood, urine, and tissue tests, and for scientists (including Partin, whose Partin Tables are used worldwide as a means of calculating a man’s prognosis) trying to predict the course of prostate cancer.
“When a new biomarker is being developed, we can test it very rapidly,” says Partin. “For instance, EPCA-2 (click for more details) moved through the system so quickly and efficiently because when Robert Getzenberg needed 700 samples, we opened up the freezers and handed them to him. In the old days, it would have taken us two years to enroll that many patients. This is helping speed discovery, and then getting those advances to the patients faster.” Many of his patients, Partin continues, feel proud to have donated samples. “They like to know that they are helping other men with prostate cancer.”
The samples date back to the early 1980s, but many of the requests from researchers are for aliquots of more recent vintage. This is because the disease has evolved, Partin notes. “For many men, it is less aggressive, because we are detecting the cancer far earlier than we did 20 years ago.” |
