[KristinSchwick]

I can sense you have a great deal of background on this subject, are you a researcher yourself? Myself, I have a Doctorate in Immunology, so I completely agree with you on a research level, but from a BC patient perspective, I believe more options are needed because not all cancers are solid, and are able to be sampled in this fashion. It sounds like the dream clinical trial, but it would need to be done on breast tissue from early stage patients (I-III), as there would be too many variables in other organ metastases. As a former researcher, I think this is a awesome idea, and I have participated in some projects looking at the tumor micro environment and it is an area that needs more attention as it is so complex.

I would just like to see some microarray trials soon to see if on a mRNA level, we can learn about drug sensitivity that way too.

Cheap to the researcher and cheap to the patient are two different things. For me personally, I can not donate a whole gram of my pelvis while alive, but would gladly donate my primary tumor of the breast except it is in paraffin and not viable. Hopefully they are able to collect enough specimens to fulfill this study, as the results could benefit all cancer patients like you said.

Kristin