The School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital YNHH have announced plans for the creation of a new laboratory for bone marrow and stem cell transplantation.
The Richard D. Frisbee III Laboratory of Stem Cell Transplantation and Hematopoietic Graft Engineering will be a highly sterile room in which healthy bone marrow and stem cells will be taken from patients with breast cancer, lymphoma and other cancers, so that the cells can be processed and transplanted back into the same patients. This procedure is used to treat various resistant or aggressive forms of cancer.
The laboratory is named for 15-year-old Richard Frisbee III, who in 1989 became the first child to receive a bone marrow transplant in Connecticut. The Frisbee Foundation, based in New Canaan, Connecticut, has contributed more than $600,000 to cancer- related programs at the medical school and the hospital.
The Frisbee Laboratory will be a "Class 10,000" clean air laboratory, a room that provides an environment with less than 10,000 particles of dust per cubic foot of air. As a resource for clinical and basic research, the facility will be shared among the Yale Cancer Center and the departments of internal medicine, pediatrics and obstetrics/gynecology at the medical school and YNHH. It will also serve as a core research facility for scientists involved in basic and applied gene research to help develop new cancer therapies based on genetic and immunologic manipulation of stem cells.
"The Frisbee Laboratory will be innovative and creative, while at the same time advancing care in both adult and pediatric stem cell transplantation," says Dr. Edward Snyder, professor of laboratory medicine at the School of Medicine, as well as vice chair of the YNHH department of laboratory medicine and director of the hospital's Blood Bank. "The laboratory will initiate a new and exciting level of interaction between the department of laboratory medicine and the Yale Cancer Center."