January 22, 2008

Banking on breakthroughs at the bench

Cancer survivor Pat Sclafani is spearheading the launch of a thoracic cancer tissue bank at Yale Cancer Center, so researchers can better understand and treat cancers of the chest.

From left to right, Arun Gopinath, technical director of the pathology department’s Fresh Frozen Tissue Service; Pat Sclafani; and David Rimm stand in front of some of the freezers that are used to store the specimens in the new thoracic tissue bank.

A year ago, Pat Sclafani was fighting for his life. Diagnosed in September 2006 with stage 4 thymoma, the 46-year-old software engineer faced a formidable opponent. But after a grueling regimen of chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, and more chemotherapy, Sclafani’s future is looking much brighter these days. “To see where I’ve come from over the last 12 months, I’d say it feels pretty good,” he says.

So good, in fact, that Sclafani is marshalling his renewed vigor to help his Yale oncology team fight the disease that threatened to kill him. He persuaded his employer, ABB Inc., through its non-profit foundation, the ABB Foundation, to make a $20,000 donation to the Thoracic Oncology Program for the purpose of starting a thoracic cancer tissue bank. 

“I’m a passionate person,” Sclafani says. “I just have another passion now. My passion is to try to help anybody else who has to go through this, because it’s not fun.” 

The tissue bank—a collection of lung, thymoma and other cancer tissues from the chest-cavity—is a research tool scientists will be able to use to study how cancer cells behave. A similar resource—a melanoma tissue bank—has been set up for skin cancer research. “The idea is that if we can bank enough tissue, scientists will be able to do the tests they need to do, and that will open up doors for more treatment options,” Sclafani says.  

David Rimm, MD, PhD, professor of pathology and director of the Yale Tissue Microarray Facility, says researchers will use the bank’s tissue samples to study molecular features of the disease and to develop risk prediction models. In the future, this information will enable them to target therapies to specific patients. “We can identify markers that can predict whether a cancer will recur and which drugs it is most likely to respond to,” he says. “There are a lot of new therapeutic options out there. Studies with this material will help us figure out who should get which ones.”

The new tissue bank, located in the basement of the Brady Building, got started in November. The bank already contains a number of older tissue samples and a collection of formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded material. The process of collecting new samples began this month, along with the acquisition of new data storage software, called CaTissue, which will enable researchers to catalog, maintain and share important clinical information about each sample. “Now our material will be well-annotated, instead of just archived,” Rimm says.  

Julietta Guarino, ABB Foundation president, says that when Sclafani proposed making a donation to Yale, the foundation was eager to participate. “He wasn’t just saying, ‘This is an organization I respect,’” she says. “He told us, ‘These are the people who saved my life.’”

Sclafani, who spoke about his experience at the naming ceremony of the new Smilow Cancer Hospital in October, says his role in setting up the tissue bank won’t be the last time he helps Yale in its efforts to study and treat cancer. “I’m going to bat for Yale because they went to bat for me,” he says. “It’s another way of slapping this disease in the face.”

But Sclafani is also thinking about future patients. “Once you’ve gone through something like this, you want to give back somehow, to try to do something to make it just a little easier for the next person,” he says.

—Jennifer Kaylin

Photo by Jennifer Kaylin

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