Tissue bank for tumors established at Stanford
About 4,300 people nationwide are diagnosed annually with an often incurable digestive tract cancer: gastrointestinal stromal tumors. Because it is so rare, researchers have trouble finding samples to study.
Now, medical school researchers have teamed with the nonprofit Life Raft Group to create a tissue bank for GIST tumors at Stanford. Jan Matthijs van de Rijn, MD, PhD, professor of pathology, led the tissue bank project, with Robert West, MD, assistant professor of pathology.
The Life Raft Group already maintains the country's largest GIST patient registry, with more than 1,100 case histories. The new tissue bank will allow patients to submit not only their stories, but also their leftover tumor tissue from surgery.
As a result, patients can now ask to have samples sent to the tissue bank. Each one will be linked with its clinical history from the patient database; then the de-identified samples will be made available to GIST researchers around the world.
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