Pioneer Valley Life Sciences Institute of Baystate Medical and Umass Amherst

Breast registrydescription: analysis-ready datasets with patient characteristics together with treatments and outcomes are essential to identify successes in clinical management and areas where limitations exist. We have created a prospective registry focused on breast cancer. This resource includes a detailed survey of lifestyle, health history along with diagnostic and treatment information. Tissue specimens are also available for all the participants. The registry provides access to patient data in a prospective fashion to facilitate evaluations of clinical outcomes.accomplishments: present enrollment total is 1,600 participants.

Biospecimen resources & molecular analysis facilitydescription: the facility maintains the equipment and personnel to provide histological services. This group also assists investigators with maintaining irb approvals for tissue procurement. Accomplishments: support services (histology, molecular analyses) has been used by investigators from Umass amherst, Umass Medical school, Baystate health systems as well as serving other academic scientists.

Breast cell repository description: normal cells from a diverse cohort of patients is needed to identify the cellular mechanisms responsible for the wide variation in responses to therapies among individuals. This effort focuses on creation of normal breast epithelial cells that reflect the variation in the population of women. Methods are used to expand the cells in vitro providing a versatile source for testing differences in sensitivity to environmental contaminants and therapeutic compounds. Accomplishments: breast cells from 500 individuals and growing. Procedures to immortalize normal breast cells from most patients have been established. We have established immortalized cell lines from normal breast epithelium from 17 donors representing diverse breast cancer risk. The cell lines are genetically stable and unique based on genetic fingerprinting. These are being used to determine differences in susceptibility to oncogenic transformation caused by chemicals and altered cell signaling.