Cancer Tissue Bank

• Tissue Bank
  • Aims and Objectives
  • Who Can Support
  • Management
  • Location
• Information for Patients
  • Patient Identification Process
• Information for Researchers
• Find Sample
• Contact

Information for Researchers

Cancer is a major global disease burden. An estimate of this burden is as follows.

• Cancer: estimated incidence worldwide
  • 12.7 million
• Cancer: estimated incidence in the UK
  • 325,000 new cancers (~500 per 100,000)
  • 157,000 deaths
• Barts Health (catchment population 820,000)
  • 4200 new cancers
• Barts Health (extended population 2.5 million)
  • 13,000 new cancers

The medical treatment focuses on:

• Main focus: diagnosis and treatment of the primary cancer
• Secondary focus: the diagnosis, surveillance, prevention and treatment of cancer metastases

Therefore cancer causes

• Immense healthcare burden in terms of
  • Cost
  • Patient anxiety
• No single diagnostic test exists for diagnosis of cancer metastases
  • A range of different scans and tumour markers are used with variable specificity and sensitivity.

What are biomarkers?

Biological markers which can be detected in human body though a range of tests can enable doctors to do various things for a disease. They can be divided as:

• Diagnostic biomarkers: enable early diagnosis
• Prognostic biomarkers: define patients requirement for additional treatment
• Predictive biomarkers: Define the type of treatment
  • Pharmacodynamic: how patient may respond to treatment for e.g., how a drug/medicine may be distributed in body and what effect/side-effect it may have
  • Efficacy response: whether patients are responding to treatment

So what is missing?

• To develop a diagnostic test, we are unable to access samples that are
  • uniformly collected
  • reliably stored
  • clinically annotated
• These patients are often seen by diverse specialities in clinics at different sites.
• No clear collaboration between clinicians working in different specialities and scientists with distinct expertise.

What are the merging opportunities in research and treatment of cancer patients?

• More effective treatments
• Centralisation of services leads to highly experienced teams with efficient protocols
• Cutting edge technologies in research such as
  • Next generation sequencing
  • Proteomics, metabolomics, and other -omics platforms
  • Cell and molecular biology
  • Targeted treatment regimens
  • Bioinformatics and IT