Why is a structure such as the NBN important for patients and people affected by cancer?
The NBN will make it possible to conduct hitherto unmanageable large-scale genomic and proteomic analyses, which are expected to accelerate drug discovery, identify new targets for disease intervention, improve the efficiency of clinical trials, and introduce a new paradigm of genomic medicine – treatment based on the patient’s genetic profile. For many years, research on human biospecimens has contributed to major scientific findings relating to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. Now and in the future, the advent of genomic and proteomic technologies makes need for – and potential of – quality human biospecimens an essential part of new biomedical discoveries.
