For Immediate Release

February 24, 2004

Mercy Collaborates in NCI Breast Cancer Research

Oklahoma City—Mercy Health Center, sponsor of the Oklahoma Breast Cancer Project, announces the first shipment of more than 1,200 tissue samples to the National Cancer Institute's Biomarker Validation Laboratory at UCLA. The paraffin-embedded surgical specimens have been collected from 119 Oklahoma women who have had previous breast biopsies, both benign and malignant, and will be used to create molecular fingerprinting that will help define the origins of breast cancer.

"Specimen banks have existed for a long time to study cancerous tissue," said project director, Alan B. Hollingsworth, M.D., "but we decided to establish a benign tissue bank. Pharmaceutical agents are available that can prevent breast cancer, but we need to have a better handle on who is really headed toward cancer. The future is relying on 'tissue predictors' of cancer, rather than traditional risk factors."

Several years ago the National Cancer Institute (NCI) formalized a new research agenda that for the first time included benign tissue, in what is now called the Early Detection Research Network. As part of this network, three laboratories nationwide perform the biomarker validation studies, and the Oklahoma Breast Cancer Project was asked to contribute first to David Chia, PhD, at the Immunogenetics Center in the UCLA Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.

"We're focused more on benign breast biopsies, especially when women have had a benign biopsy years before they developed breast cancer," said Dr. Hollingsworth. "Most people are unaware that biopsy tissue remains embedded in paraffin, is stored indefinitely and is rarely looked at again. This tissue is a gold mine for researchers; yet, it's a forbidden mine unless someone works through the difficult issues surrounding informed patient consent and the need for an exhaustive database. That's where the Oklahoma Breast Cancer Project comes in, doing the background work and providing specimens for the nation's leading researchers so that they can devote their time to the actual study of the tissue."

For women who want to donate specimens from previous benign biopsies, the Oklahoma Breast Cancer Project will do the work of finding and retrieving the blocks from the cooperating laboratories in Oklahoma and elsewhere. For more information, and a list of participating facilities, go to www.oklahomabreastcancer.org and click on the Oklahoma Breast Cancer Project icon.

Mercy Health Center is a member of Mercy Health System of Oklahoma and the Sisters of Mercy Health System-St. Louis.

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