DESCRIPTION: (Applicant's Description)
The CFRBCS was established in 1995 to stimulate cooperative efforts to provide
a resource for epidemiologic and interdisciplinary studies of individuals at
high risk for breast cancer. The six participating institutions have created a
powerful research infrastructure which has become a model for family studies.
A series of working groups with representation from each site has standardized
epidemiologic and family history survey instruments, developed uniform
procedures for data collection and management, tissue collection, processing,
quality control and distribution, established a mechanism of peer review for
proposed studies, and adopted common language for the design and approach to
informed consent. As a result, over 5,500 families with a spectrum of familial
risk for breast and ovarian cancer have been recruited and 33 studies using
the resources of the CFRBCS have been approved. The CFRBCS has many strengths,
including its focus on the family at risk, representation from both
population- and clinic-based populations, its attention to quality of data,
and the broad base of expertise in breast cancer represented among the six
participating sites. The CFRBCS now turns its attention to the maintenance and
expansion of this resource for the purpose of carrying out an ambitious and
creative research agenda which will carry the field of breast cancer research
into the new millenium. The specific aims of this Core Module are: 1) to
complete recruitment of families with known mutation status (either positive
or negative) to support new gene discovery, gene/environment and gene/gene
studies; 2) to extend minority and Ashkenazi Jewish family recruitment for
gene studies and psychosocial studies; 3) to continue pathology acquisition
and pathology review to support clinical/pathology studies, to expand
collection of tumor blocks to include all tumor types for new gene discovery
studies; 4) to continue the transformation and immortalization of lymphocytes:
5) to administer and enter follow-up questionnaires into the database; 6) to
maintain a functioning database, biospecimen repository, and distribution
capability; and 7) to participate in the research modules for the competitive
UO1 renewal.
Error Notice
The database may currently be offline for maintenance and should be operational soon. If not, we have been notified of this error and will be reviewing it shortly.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
- The DCCPS Team.