For the last year or so, Harold Sanchez, MD, and Marcello DiStasio, MD, PhD, have been busy building the Yale Legacy Tissue Donation Program, collecting tissue samples, and providing them to biomedical researchers.
Now that the Yale Legacy Tissue Donation Program is off the ground, Dr. Sanchez and Dr. DiStasio, who serve as program Co-Directors, are gearing up for the next phase, which includes increasing the number of samples by getting more patients to consider tissue donation.
On January 5, they presented at Yale Neuroscience Clinical Grand Rounds, the first of several presentations planned. Dr. Sanchez said tissue donation is a viable option for people unable to donate organs.
“People who are considering organ donation may have conditions that make them ineligible. But they may be ideal candidates to donate tissue samples for research,” he said.
The best way to understand the biology of human illnesses like cancer, autoimmune disease, and neurodegenerative disease is to look directly at human tissue affected by these diseases, Dr. DiStasio said.
“The real advantage to using high-quality tissue is you get much more robust interpretable results from a very wide array of technologies,” he said.
But obtaining this tissue can be challenging. That is why the Legacy Tissue Donation Program exists and why Dr. Sanchez and Dr. DiStasio are working to spread the word about the program and identify interested researchers and donors.
“We have contacts with all types of labs across the institution doing very interesting research, and this is a great way to participate,” Dr. DiStasio said. “If you have your own studies, this is a great way to obtain tissue for that work.
“But what we really need now is buy-in from our patient-facing colleagues in order to help with recruiting consenting patients. That’s the lifeblood of this program.”
The program allows patients to donate tissue for research after their death. They can limit what tissue they donate and change their minds at any time, for any reason. But this final altruistic gesture has a direct impact on medical research by providing scientists with tissue they can obtain in no other way.
For more information, please contact Dr. Sanchez or Dr. DiStasio.