A biotech company wants cancer and heart patients to let it sell leftover tissue from their surgeries to genetic researchers working on finding new drugs and cures.
“We’re going to greatly improve the speed, cost and success rate of drug discovery,” said Eric Gordon, CEO of Ardais, a Massachusetts-based for-profit corporation hoping to create a huge catalogue of tissue slides for researchers.
The project will use tissue that would otherwise be discarded as medical waste, and will protect a donor’s privacy “behind a double firewall of the latest encryption technology,” he said.
The goal is to “bridge the gap between gene discovery and the clinical medicine needed to apply this knowledge to treating diseases” by letting scientists test hundreds of relevant samples at one time.
The first medical institutions to sign up with Ardais – agreeing to ask their patients if they want to take part – are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina.
Gordon said that so far no medical institutions in New York have agreed to participate.
The project would alter the way a cancer patient undergoes surgery to remove a tumor.
“The pathologist takes his sample for his diagnosis,” he said. “Right now, the remaining sample would be discarded and the secrets of the disease would go with it.”
But if the patient agrees to donate the leftover specimen, researchers would also get “associated medical information, what was the drug history used, the course of treatment, the pathology of that specimen, some familial characteristics like sex and age,” Gordon said.
“But there is no identity of the individual. All that has been coded, and does not enable us or any researcher to identify who the donor was.”
Most of the tissue sought will be from patients suffering from cancer, heart disease or inflammatory ailments.
Gordon said none of the samples will be used for transplants or cloning and that “we’re not using fetal tissues.”