By Stephen Ornes
What Happens to a Donated Tumor?
Tissue banks may hold the key to cancer research, but can we overcome the obstacles to unlocking their full potential?
By Stephen Ornes
In the case of tumor donation, however, informed consent can be complicated. Specific details about future research that could make use of the donation aren’t usually known at the time of surgery, so patients may be asked to sign a consent form that gives an investigator broad permission to use the tumor.
Tumor donation issues will probably be the last thing on a patient’s mind, says Mary Lou Smith, a two-time breast cancer survivor who has donated tissue to both the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Tissue Bank, located at Indiana University’s Simon Cancer Center in Indianapolis, and the tissue bank at Northwestern University’s Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center in Chicago.
“When you’re diagnosed, you really do get put in a different mind-set very quickly,” Smith says. “When my doctor said, ‘We have a tissue bank here, and my nurse will give you the informed consent,’ I knew about it already. If I hadn’t, I don’t know that I would have been in a great frame of mind [to consider donation].”
Smith helped found the Research Advocacy Network, an organization dedicated to educating patient advocates. She says if patients know about the promise of research that requires donated tumors, they may be more likely to donate.
“They have to get excited that it means something to the research and 
therefore future patients,” she says. “Most cancer patients I know are pretty altruistic. They would prefer it helps them, but if it can’t help them, it could help someone.”
Who Owns a Donated Tumor?
The issue of tissue ownership immediately comes into play as pen hits the informed consent form. In the body, as unwanted as it is, a tumor is clearly owned by the person whose body it inhabits. But the picture blurs after surgery. The answer to “Who owns a tumor?” depends on whom you ask.
“Patients ultimately own their own tissue,” says pathologist David Rimm, the gatekeeper of the tumor archive at the Yale School of Medicine. “If they request access to the tissue, we will give them the block [containing the tumor].”