Tissue Procurement Protocol for Patients Undergoing Treatment for Early-Stage Breast Cancer

Through the investigators' Breast Care Center at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, the investigators treat approximately 75 patients per year with neoadjuvant chemotherapy. The majority of the remainder of patients with stage II and III disease undergo treatment with adjuvant chemotherapy either on a clinical protocol or as standard of care. There is a subset of women with ER positive disease who do not receive chemotherapy because of favorable tumor characteristics.

This tissue procurement protocol is designed to systematically collect tissue, urine and blood specimens on patients undergoing neoadjuvant systemic therapy or adjuvant chemotherapy, serially following treatment, and/or at the time of disease recurrence in order to investigate mechanisms underlying development of metastatic disease, to identify predictors of response and resistance to therapy, and to test potential new therapies for breast cancer using a combination of patient-derived xenograft creation and new microfluidic technologies.