I Cancers Selected for Study by TCGA

The Pilot Project will focus on three types of cancers: brain (glioblastoma multiforme), lung (squamous carcinoma), and ovarian (serous cystadenocarcinoma). Together, these cancers account for more than 210,000 cancer cases each year in the United States.

These cancers were selected because of the availability of high-quality human tissue collections, known as biorepositories, that met TCGA’s strict scientific, technical, and ethical requirements, and because these cancers have poor prognoses for diagnosed patients. Their selection was the result of a process that began in the fall of 2005 with a Human Cancer Biospecimen Collection Request for Information (RFI) from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and notification to the broader cancer research community of TCGA’s need for biospecimens. The goal of the process was to identify existing (i.e. “retrospective”) biospecimen collections that employed the highest level of ethical, technical, biologic, pathologic, and bioinformatics standards in the development of their biorepository. Once potential biospecimen collections were identified, an evaluation process was implemented to select cancers that met the technical requirements of TCGA and also addressed public health considerations, such as burden of disease. The collections were identified from within the NCI’s existing clinical research infrastructure.

Read more >> National Institutes of Health to Map Genomic Changes of Lung, Brain, and Ovarian Cancers