View source for National Cancer Institute Biobanking/Biorepositories

'''National Cancer Institute Biobanking/Biorepositories'''

The National Cancer Institute’s pilot program to establish a multi-center, yet standardized,  biorepository of cancer specimens began with the prostate cancer Biorepository Coordination System (BCS).(1) This was a planned eleven institution physical and informational network linking individual institutional repositories of prostate cancer specimens into a giant, integrated resource with aims to improve research into prostate cancer biomarkers. The program was meant to be initiated in two stages, with progress reviews of the first stage occurring in January and April of 2006. (2) Unfortunately, the project was felt to not be cost effective and was subsequently abandoned.

One survivor of the BCS project is the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG). caBIG is both a network of over 80 collaborating organizations (including 50 National Cancer Institute-designated  as well as a collection of freely-available web-based software packages, including software to gather and process laboratory results including blood tests, micro-array data, and single nucleotide polymorphism data. (3)

Current National Cancer Institute biorepository efforts have resulted in two ongoing  research projects. The [http://cancergenome.nih.gov/index.asp Cancer Genome Atlas] is a project to characterize the messenger RNA signatures of different tumors (4), while the [http://proteomics.cancer.gov/ Clinical Proteonomic Technologies Initiative] is a corollary effort on characterizing the protein expression signature of tumors (5).

These National Cancer Institute biorepository efforts have not only included “wet bench” projects and informatics programs, but also the development of ethical guidelines and patient protection statements. Foremost among these statements is the First-Generation Guidelines for NCI-Supported Biorepositories. (6)


(1) [http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/nov2005/nci-07c.htm NIH press release], November 7, 2005

(2) http://biospecimens.cancer.gov/resources/faqs.asp

(3) https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/participants

(4) http://biospecimens.cancer.gov/


[[Category:OHSU-F-06]]