Picture a massive library, but instead of books it holds anonymous tissue samples that researchers can check out and analyze at any time to help find cures for diseases.
Thanks to the work of ITM Co-Director Susan Cohn, MD, this system is in the early launch stages at the University of Chicago.
It begins with a universal consent form that will be presented to all University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) patients asking whether the blood or tissue samples that would otherwise be thrown away could be saved and repurposed for research.
Those samples would then be stored in the Human Tissue Resource Center (HTRC), a core facility that catalogues and houses a quarter of a million tissue samples for research much like a library organizes its books.
Investigators could then check out samples to study things like how brain cancer develops in children in order to find ways to stop it in its tracks.