Breast Cancer Awareness Biobank, bioinformatics at the heart of Windber research

Randy Griffith, The Tribune-Democrat, Johnstown, Pa.
·3 min read

Oct. 3—WINDBER, Pa. — The bench research area at Chan Soon-Shiong Institute of Molecular Medicine at Windber could be the set for a scene from the popular crime investigation TV show "NCIS."

Bunsen burners, beakers, test tubes, microscopes, glass slides and an array of analytical technology line the counters and cabinets. White-coated researchers prepare, measure, examine and record reactions and other data.

But hands-on lab activity is only a small part of the 23-year-old institute's work.

Its mainstays are represented by the nearly 600,000 frozen tissue samples in about 40 liquid nitrogen isothermic freezers and mechanical upright cold-storage units, and by the specialized information technology networks providing huge databases of cancer research details, along with proprietary software systems for several national studies.

The biobanking and bioinformatics programs make the Windber organization a hub for scientists around the country working through collaborative partnerships that include Windber.

"It accelerates research by bringing so many people together and bringing resources together," Biobank Senior Director Stella Somiari said at the institute.

Using specific protocols developed for each study, Somiari's team in the College of American Pathologists-certified tissue bank provides tissue samples or data already extracted from the frozen specimens to scientists collaborating in the national research networks connected through Walter Reed National Military Medical Center's John Murtha Cancer Center and the Murtha Cancer Center Research Program of the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.

Tissue and blood samples have been collected since 2000 from about 30,000 participants, including more than 10,000 through Windber's participation in Walter Reed's Clinical Breast Care Project.

Some of those samples were collected from patients at the Joyce Murtha Breast Care Center at Chan Soon-Shiong Medical Center at Windber.

Joyce Murtha center Director Erin Goins said local participation in the research has increased lately and the center has added additional staff to coordinate with the institute.

"We added two research assistants, so now there are four," Goins said. "They are staying pretty busy."

Information on participating in the institute's research is included for the Murtha center's patients through Chan Soon-Shiong Medical Center through the patient portal to Windber's online medical records system.

"We talk to them a good bit, and we are looking to make a pamphlet about how to participate," she said.

The biorepository includes 84,000 samples not associated with Walter Reed and the Department of Defense.

Those samples are reserved for Windber's own studies and collaborations with private organizations, such as the Susan B. Komen for the Cure breast cancer organization.

Working with the Komen nonprofit since 2010, Chief Scientific Officer Hai Hu said, Windber was part of a dozen new studies published last year.

The research institute's bioinformatics team is led by Leonid Kvecher, director of biomedical informatics infrastructure.

The group has developed software infrastructure to analyze and catalog the vast amount of information contained in each cell.

That information is multiplied by the number of samples used in each study and factors in the patient de-identified demographic and health information.

Kvecher oversaw the development of bioinformatics at not only the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute of Molecular Medicine at Windber, but also the John P. Murtha Cancer Center at Walter Reed and the collaborative APOLLO program.