) The potential to understand ovarian cancer at the most basic molecular level poses a challenge to the scientific community to apply the new and developing technologies to advance our understanding of this deadly disease. What has been lacking is the opportunity to prospectively follow a sufficiently large cohort of women with ovarian cancer or with a familial risk for ovarian cancer to definitively address these questions. The FCCC proposes the establishment of The Ovarian Cancer Clinical Network Core, a research-based infrastructure to facilitate the conduct of translational research and to transfer novel prevention, screening and treatment strategies into clinical practice. This core represents a partnership of FCCC, the Fox Chase Network, Cooper Medical Center, Temple University, the Cancer Institute of new Jersey, Hershey Medical Center, and the University of Pennsylvania and provides access to a wide spectrum of ethnic, socioeconomic and rural/urban populations. Building upon an established infrastructure of over 1600 high risk breast cancer families and using the combined resources of the core facility, a cohort of families with histopathologic documentation of one or more cases of ovarian cancer will be assembled. Extensive information on medical, reproductive, family and lifestyle factors will be collected. Blood samples will be collected from all participants. Ovarian tissue specimens will be requested from affected individuals as well as those unaffected family members undergoing oophorectomy for prophylaxis. The core will design, develop, and support a comprehensive information management system to ensure accurate data entry and maintenance and to serve the needs of the SPORE investigators. Counseling and screening protocols will be standardized and disseminated to health care professionals. This facility will build upon the seminal work underway at Fox Chase to serve the needs of high-risk families and will expand these efforts to foster multidisciplinary research projects. The creation of a dynamic ovarian cancer research database provides a unique opportunity to address multidisciplinary research questions and to bring the knowledge about ovarian cancer generated by the genetic revolution to the community.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 323 publications
