The ultimate success of the project depends on the collection of a sufficient number of samples to determine the patterns of genetic expression profiles. The original target was for a total of 100 patients’ samples. However the project is currently significantly ahead of this schedule and currently have collected a total of over 250 samples from 60+ patients. This is a laborious process and requires the research assistant to wait for long periods in the endoscopy suite for each colonoscopic procedure to be completed to obtain a biopsy sample. To date the only collected tissue has been from patients at The Royal London Hospital, but the recent granting of ethical permission for the study at St Mark’s Hospital means that we can now obtain samples from patients there. As this is one of the busiest departments in Europe for performing colonoscopies and operating on patients with colon cancer, the number of samples will increase rapidly. In view of these factors, the revised target is to collect samples from several hundred patients. Not only will this greatly increase the scientific validity of the results, but the wide variety of patients treated at St Mark’s Hospital will allow for different sub-groups of patients to be studied, again increasing the value of our eventual results. |
