Women make up 20 percent to 25 percent of the armed services, and breast cancer is observed at younger ages than ever before. Women in the military are at the same risk of breast cancer as civilians. The Clinical Breast Care Project (CBCP) at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC) www.wrnmmc.capmed.mil is a funded program designed to understand, treat, and prevent breast cancer.
According to an article appearing in the WRNMMC “Department of Research Programs Newsletter”, one goal is to develop an integrated computational and biomedical informatics infrastructure with an integrated data warehouse related to diseases of the breast. CBCP uses a multidisciplinary approach to study breast cancer and uses high-throughput molecular biology-based methods and discovery to augment clinical care.
One of CBCP’s goals has been to do tissue banking to develop and maintain one of the finest repository for human bio specimens of breast diseases. The CBCP works closely with a biorepository at the Windber Research Institute www.wriwindber.org in Pennsylvania that stores collected breast tissues, lymph nodes, and blood samples as well as samples from many other types of cancers. So far, CBCP has collected over 60,000 tissue samples from over 7,000 patients.
The biorepository has collaborated on studies with Vanderbilt University www.vanderbilt.edu , Anne Arundel Medical Center www.aahs.org, National Cancer Institute www.cancer.gov, Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Project www.komen.org, Thomas Jefferson University www.jefferson.edu, and the NCCP Cancer Drug Management Program www.hse.ie.