Denver - New York, Monday - February 12, 2007: Morris Animal Foundation (MAF) and Pfizer Animal Health have jointly announced a $1.1 million donation from Pfizer to establish a national canine tumor biospecimen bank. This tumor tissue bank is expected to be an especially valuable asset in the quest to treat and curecancer in dogs and may provide insights into human cancer as well. Funds for the tumor bank are restricted to the Canine Comparative Oncology and Genetics Consortium (CCOGC), a group of veterinary and medical researchers who have determined that a well-described repository of canine tumor tissues is an essential resource to progress new cancer therapies.
This new resource to fight cancer has been named the Pfizer – CCOGC Biospecimen Repository. The bank will be located in Bethesda, Maryland.
MAF, established in 1948, took the lead role in securing the donation from Pfizer and will provide the oversight to monitor the progress of the CCOGC in collection, storage and distribution of tumor samples. MAF has previously funded over 80 canine cancer studies and is scheduled to announce a major canine cancer initiative in April 2007.
MAF and the AKC Canine Health Foundation provided the initial funding ($500,000) to launch this national biospecimen bank and will be collaborating to secure the remaining funds. The estimated total cost to populate the tissue bank is $2.2 million. The estimated time to populate the tissue bank is three years. Once completed, the tissue bank will contain some 3,000 samples including: 600 osteosarcoma, 600 lymphoma, 600 melanoma, with the remaining 1,200 drawn from other cancers. These high-quality samples will be used by veterinary and medical scientists worldwide in their quest to develop new treatments for cancer.
