Abstract
The only unequivocal radiological effect of the Chernobyl accident on human health is the increase in thyroid cancer in those exposed in childhood or early adolescence. In response to the scientific interest in studying the molecular biology of thyroid cancer post Chernobyl, the Chernobyl Tissue Bank (CTB: www.chernobyltissuebank.com) was established in 1998. Thus far it is has collected biological samples from 3,861 individuals, and provided 27 research projects with 11,254 samples. The CTB was designed from its outset as a resource to promote the integration of research and clinical data to facilitate a systems biology approach to radiation related thyroid cancer. The project has therefore developed as a multidisciplinary collaboration between clinicians, dosimetrists, molecular biologists and bioinformaticians and serves as a paradigm for tissue banking in the omics era.
Highlights
Cancer is an extremely complex disease that involves the interaction of biological pathways on a number of levels
The Chernobyl Tissue BanküThe Paradigm for a Cancer Resource Designed for Systems Biology
In the early 1990s, a number of projects studying the effect of the Chernobyl accident were funded by the four sponsors listed above
Summary
Cancer is an extremely complex disease that involves the interaction of biological pathways on a number of levels. The data presented here only reflect cancer incidence, but there is evidence from the UkraineAmerican cohort study that benign tumors of the thyroid are increasing in incidence as a result of the radiation exposure [8] at a lower rate than cancers. Whilst having serious consequences for the population, those under 19 years old living in the immediate vicinity of the power station at the time of the accident, and those involved in the early phases of the clean-up of the accident and exposed to high levels of radiation from the fallout, the Chernobyl accident provides a unique opportunity to collect samples of a human cancer, with a low natural incidence, for which both the etiology and the time of exposure to the etiological agent is known. Thyroid cancer is normally rare in children; of the order of 1 per million per year, there is 50% variation in this figure across the globe [5]
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