Researchers at Mater Hospital Brisbane are encouraging women with gynaecological cancers to donate to the state’s only live tissue biobank in a bid to improve patient outcomes.
The South Brisbane hospital runs the state’s only program using live collections of gynaecological tissue samples to improve treatments of aggressive cancers.
The live tissue samples provide a better result compared with cryopreserved cells, where the samples can be damaged during freezing and thawing methods, causing cells to die.
Instead, researchers can use and manipulate a patient’s living cancer cells in a petri dish, or even grow them in a pre-clinical model to better understand how ovarian cancer develops, and find the cancer’s weak points that might be susceptible to novel therapies.
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