A Medical Center Network for Optimized Lung Cancer Biospecimen Banking

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in men and women today. Doctors and scientists need samples from patients with lung cancer in order to do research to better diagnose and treat this disease. Often samples from lung cancer patients are not saved for research, and this has been a problem for scientists wanting to study this disease. We want to make a bank of lung cancer tissue samples and also get samples of blood, urine, and saliva from lung cancer patients. We will make the samples in this bank available to doctors and scientists to study.

We have formed a group of doctors, nurses, and laboratory workers at 3 medical centers (The University of Virginia, the Medical University of South Carolina, and Washington University in St. Louis) that will ask patients with lung cancer to participate. Since no tissue other than what is taken for normal surgery will be used in this effort, and because getting blood, urine, and saliva is usually not harmful, we feel that there is little chance of harm to these patients. The greatest risk is loss of privacy, and we have measures in place that will help protect their privacy: samples will only be labeled with a code number and not with their name, and all information will be kept in secure paper files or computer files. The scientists given these samples will not be told the identity of the patients.

In addition to getting these samples, we will also be collecting some information from the patients' medical charts to help the scientists with their studies. This includes the size of the tumor, the type of the tumor, what treatments the patients are receiving, and the results of the therapy. This will help the scientists understand things they find with the samples.

The types of research that will be supported by these samples will include understanding molecular changes in cancer tissue that makes this a deadly disease. These changes could point to new treatment options. We also expect that these samples will be used to find new tests for blood, saliva, or urine that can be used to better diagnosis lung cancer, or to better predict how much danger a patient is in from their tumor. A test may also be made that helps doctors determine the best therapy for an individual patient.