MBCproject, the Early Days

For the past several months, our team at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Dana Faber has put all the pieces in place to launch the #MBCproject.  As with any endeavor, there are always important milestones. I never thought that picking up a box that people would spit in to would be one of those impactful moments, but I almost shed tears when I opened up the box that held our first 20 saliva kits.

They were real. I could hold them in my hands. I could open them. I could look inside at the instructions.  I saw the logo that we decided on months ago, and the instructions that another team member drafted. I saw the shape of the tube that is manufactured to fit perfectly on the high through put machines that will process the samples once they are returned to us. Right there in those boxes were the unique ID numbers that we will use to link all of the data together after we collect information from the DNA in each patient’s tumor samples.  So Much Work went into this seemingly simple rectangular box that sat in front of me. And So Much Work will happen once we receive it back. All of which will push the envelop on what the entire biomedical community has in our collective tool kit for understanding metastatic breast cancer.

I ran up the stairs and showed them to the many members of our team (pictured here) who have all played a role in bringing this project together. It was pretty remarkable to share in the collective excitement upon seeing the very first tangible evidence that we will soon have data from MBC patients.

Each one of those boxes will carry a wealth of information. In spit, there are cells that slough off, and in those cells are “normal” DNA. In order for us to understand what mutations are driving cancer, or are possibly responsible for certain patients having an extraordinary response to therapy, we need to compare the mutations in their tumor, to their “normal” DNA.  And if you’re wondering why I keep putting quotes around “normal”, it’s because there’s no such thing as normal, but rather normal to each individual.   Every single patient is unique, and each of the differences that are hard coded inside of each cell is a clue. Take those clues and layer them on top of the mountain of information that we will obtain from studying each patients tumors, and there’s a glimpse into the genetic underpinnings of this disease. Take this one step further and add information about what each patient has experienced clinically, and we can put the information that we obtain from the normal and tumor DNA into context to help us make sense of the letters that will stream out of our sequencing machines. And perhaps the most important part of this endeavor? Ask each patent about their experiences with metastatic breast cancer, listen to them, and learn with them.

These are the early days of the MBCproject, when we don’t have data, but we have the culmination of many months of work that will allow us to reach out to our first patients. Everything is new, and the promise of discovery is still locked away in stored samples on shelves of hospitals and in, as one patient recently put it, “My spit, which I carry around with me everywhere”.

For the next several months, we will be collecting information from medical records, from DNA, and provided by the voice of the patient. And in turn, we will pull all of this together in order to move the needle for the MBC community, for the biomedical community and for all of us affected by cancer.

We’re on twitter @MBC_project, #MBCproject and on FaceBook Metastatic Breast Cancer Project