It took several months to recover, but I returned to work later that year and kept building our network of 16 clinics and hospitals that participate in the clinical trials, tissue bank and genome research.
caBIG spans multiple research domains, including basic biology, genomics, proteomics, clinical trials, tissue banking and pathology, and imaging.
In most clinical trials, tissue blocks will be collected by a large number of centers, many of them without any expertise in the processing of samples for molecular analyses and using different protocols for fixation and embedding.
In addition, a small number of trials have been conducted in a range of other cancer types including cancer of the endometrium/uterus (two trials), kidney (nine trials) and pancreas (five trials), soft tissue sarcoma (three trials) and melanoma (five trials).
To assess whether the Rac-FRET mouse is useful for examining Rac activity in the skin, while at the same time trialling tissue-specific expression, we crossed Rac-FRETfl/fl to K14-Cre mice to induce selective Raichu-Rac expression in keratinocytes.
Their report illustrates some of the real difficulties in designing a clinical trial for tissue engineered products.
Throughout the trial, external tissue damage was examined visually, but no change was observed.
Our studies were of skin biopsies only and, especially in the context of the HDIT/HCT trial, fresh tissue samples were limited.
Within the current trial, tumor tissue and serum (both stored locally) will be collected together with the clinical data.
The clinical trial includes tissue sample collection for future translational research and the development/validation of biomarkers.
