“It was the fund’s first foray into making an impact through research,” recalls Jennifer McDonald, assistant vice president of development at the OSUCCC – James. “Stefanie was very excited about this.”
She had good reason to be enthusiastic. The cohort and tissue bank has enabled an extraordinary collection of clinical, blood and tissue samples from thousands of patients with breast cancer, making it among the nation’s most comprehensive tissue banks of its kind. The depth and breadth of the data and samples are contributing to discoveries in the laboratory that are improving patients’ lives.
We talked with Daniel Stover, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at Ohio State an medical oncology lead for the Spielman Breast Cancer Cohort and Tissue Bank, to learn more about how the tissue bank works — and how it’s poised to make life-saving discoveries.
How does the tissue bank collect samples?
It’s absolutely a partnership with patients, and we couldn’t do it without them. We screen patients who are coming in to the Spielman Center — either existing or new patients — who will allow us to study the clinical data from their electronic medical records and potentially provide a blood sample or access to their leftover tissue. Over 97% of the patients we approach consent to participate. Most people are happy that their leftover tissue or data might help other patients with breast cancer in the future.
What kind of patients do you study?
We have collected a large number of samples from women who were recently diagnosed with breast cancer, but more recently we’ve shifted our focus to women with metastatic or advanced breast cancer — a group of patients who have an incurable disease and have been understudied. One of the amazing things is that we have this great repository of data from women around the time of diagnosis, and now we’re able to build and target it at the women who really need more research.
Why was it important for the Spielman Fund to invest in the tissue bank?
Most research funding typically supports basic studies like cell lines, mouse work in the lab and large clinical trials testing new therapies. But the in-between, where you try to collect patient samples and study them, is not frequently supported by grant agencies. That's why support from the Spielman Fund is so critical; it allows for the collection of tissue and data that are there and ready for those critical studies. We have an amazing repository that's been collected over the past decade, so we’re primed to help take that leap from basic science to clinical implementation.
Tell us about some of the notable discoveries the tissue bank has contributed to.
The tissue bank has contributed to large, multi-institutional studies of tens of thousands of patients to understand new inherited genetic mutations that might increase risk for developing breast cancer. We know the big genes associated with risk — BRCA1 and BRCA2 — and we have a growing understanding that many more genes are involved, but we need samples to study those. When we think about the legacy of Stefanie Spielman and of carrying forward her mission, one of the big things we can learn more about is predicting risk for younger women with breast cancer.
Another important study looked at significant potential side effects of a common breast cancer chemotherapy treatment. That’s a key thing the tumor bank can do: help us understand how treatments can affect breast cancer patients in terms of side effects and the long-term effects of their treatment. The bank has also contributed to the advancement of many fundamental scientific discoveries, including a study on a new immunotherapy that was published last year.
It sounds like the tissue bank has already produced some great results. What are you excited about for the future?
I think we’re just starting to realize the promise of this bank. It took a long time to get a critical number of patients enrolled, but now we have all those samples and years of follow-up on these patients. Some of the active research involves new digital pathology techniques like artificial intelligence, and how we might predict other complications like heart disease by looking at markers in the blood of breast cancer patients. We have new ways to look at tumor DNA using technology that was not even developed when the tumor bank started. All the energy put into the tumor bank can now be leveraged to take advances forward.