The Stefanie Spielman Breast Cancer Cohort and Tissue Bank has helped generate millions of research dollars for Ohio State in the 14 years since the Stefanie Spielman Fund invested in Stefanie’s dream to catalyze research to end breast cancer.
Using tissue samples collected by the Spielman Breast Cancer Cohort and Tissue Bank, Ohio State investigators have garnered more than $10 million in federal and national research grants and published more than 20 studies in leading medical journals, according to a report compiled in 2021 by Spielman Breast Bank medical oncology lead Daniel Stover, MD.
It is an honor to be fulfilling Stefanie’s dream for breast cancer research,” Stover says. “I hope she would be proud to see how her idea has grown.”
The tissue bank has acquired thousands of breast cancer samples from women who received their treatment at Ohio State. Its repository of clinical data and blood and tissue samples makes the tissue bank one of the nation’s largest and most comprehensive of its kind. Over the years, it has expanded its inventory beyond samples from recently diagnosed women to include samples from women with metastatic and advanced disease.
Additionally, the cohort of scientific and clinical researchers has contributed to multiple high-impact advances and publications in the breast cancer field, many of which are already improving patients’ lives.
“As technologies and our understanding of breast cancer have advanced, we are primed to leverage the Spielman Fund’s investment to make further discoveries,” Stover says. “We are using the detailed clinical data in ongoing studies looking at features related to patient risk, treatment toxicity and rare subtypes of breast cancer.”