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Students and Communities for a Cause
Personalizing cancer medicine to the precise needs of each patient, based on his or her genetic profile, is a much-discussed focus of cancer medicine. CINJ has been at its forefront, and will remain so, thanks in part to gifts from the Jewels of Charity and Stephen & Mary Birch Foundation. The gifts of $300,000 each from these longtime benefactors have allowed CINJ to launch an expansion of its Tissue Analytic Services (TAS) core facility.
TAS– A Key to Personalized Medicine
Since the mapping of the human genome in 2003, the pace of developing personalized medicine has accelerated. A profile of a patient’s genetic makeup can guide the selection of cancer drugs and treatment protocols that minimize harmful side effects and ensure a more successful outcome. It can also indicate susceptibility to certain diseases before they manifest, so that monitoring can begin at an earlier age than recommended, and prevention strategies can be followed.
Understanding more about genetic differences requires analysis and storage of tissue specimens, coordinating data collection and clinical information related to those specimens. TAS creates a core facility to advance the work of all CINJ researchers and clinicians that will ultimately benefit patients and healthy individuals.
Over the past decade Jewels of Charity and Stephen & Mary Birch Foundation have invested nearly $1.5 million and $600,000, respectively, in pioneering research and programs at CINJ. Their combined gifts have enabled CINJ to leverage other resources into even larger research efforts that were novel and had broad application. “When offered the flexibility to aggregate resources we can be truly innovative in the research initiatives that we develop,” said CINJ Deputy Director Edmund Lattime, PhD. “This TAS core facility is a prime example. Both foundations have had the vision to enable truly creative, large scale scientific endeavors to get underway.”
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