1/17/2012
The entire brain tumor community has a strong stake in helping The Cancer Genome Atlas to reach its goal of completely characterizing 11,000 cancer samples by 2014. As you know, TCGA already discovered four new subtypes of glioblastoma in the last two years. This discovery is paving the way for informed selection of therapies for patients. TCGA is seeking tumor tissue for low-grade gliomas for comprehensive genomic analysis. If TCGA can collect a sufficient number of useful samples, it will be able to add important knowledge to its Data Portal, a freely available resource for the cancer research community. This is where you come in. We ask that you make every effort to help TCGA by getting them the low-grade glioma samples they need. They currently have about 180 cases of grade 2 and grade 3 oligodendrogliomas, oligoastrocytomas and astrocytomas. Let's help them reach their goal of 500.
To help TCGA - please contact Kenna Shaw (shawk@mail.nih.gov) as soon as possible to discuss the specifications and the biospecimen requirements, which are also summarized on their website. Funding is available to reimburse you for the work involved. More information on this support for sample acquisition can be found here: http://www.fdbdo.com/s12-335/
Just imagine if in the next twelve months we can all say that we helped TCGA to take the next steps to sequence, analyze and characterize low-grade gliomas and in turn help the research community advance efforts to find treatments for the many low-grade gliomas in addition to high-grade gliomas such as GBM.
Thank you in advance for doing as much as you can, right away, to help TCGA.
