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From the office of Dan Berney

Click here to meet Sak

The Orchid Tissue Bank

One of the biggest challenges we face today is trying to understand ’the natural history’ of prostate, testicular and penile cancers – if we can identify the causes of these diseases, we can improve the treatment and care available for the thousands of men diagnosed with these cancers every year.

Examining actual tissue samples is a vital part of the research process.

You may be familiar with the term “tissue bank”. Put simply, it is tissue from surgery that is not needed for testing and is donated by patients. The tissue is stored in a central location and used in scientific studies. Being able to use or see actual tissue under a microscope and to know the patient’s medical history is a significant advantage to animal models, cell culture or imaging such as MRI which is often used in research into urological disease.

As a pathologist, I spend half my time looking down the microscope at tissue biopsies to identify the type of cancer a patient might have and suggest a course of treatment, and the other half researching the causes of male cancers, thanks to a grant from Orchid. Orchid funds one of the UK’s leading prostate and testis tumour banks. The bank stores over 4000 testis and prostate tumour tissues. There are over 2000 testis tumour tissues dating back to 1950.

Last year, your support helped me and my team to collect, analyse and store over 300 new tissue and blood samples for the bank from patients with prostate cancer. Each sample is vital to our research work and takes us one step closer to understanding these cancers and to improving the treatment and care we can offer patients.

Today, in these challenging times, we need your help more than ever before to continue this work. It costs £50 to collect, analyse and store just one tumour tissue sample. This may seem expensive but I believe it’s a small price to pay in the fight against male cancer. 

How the Orchid Tissue Bank is helping research

The quality and range of tissue and information stored at the bank is second to none. Teams of researchers from across the UK and also globally access this service to help further their work. For example, our most exciting research, in collaboration with Memorial Sloane Kettering Hospital in New York has already yielded ten publications and is called The Trans-Atlantic Prostate Group. This Group is looking at 1600 UK patients with prostate cancer who were diagnosed between 1991 and 1995 and have been followed up, and their tissue stored. They are monitoring the progress of prostate cancer in a specific group of patients who did not receive operations or radiotherapy. Excitingly, we have identified new molecular techniques which can tell us how dangerous the tumour is and whether it needs treatment.

With your support we plan to expand this tissue collection to over 3000 cases in the next 3 years.

Another piece of research involves the study of circulating cancer cells from the blood of patients in clinical trials who have hormone resistant prostate cancer. By improving our understanding of how cancer develops, how different treatments work, how best to deliver them and the effect these treatments have on patients in the longer term, we will be better placed to offer a specialist programme of treatment to every patient in the future. 

Why we need your help

Last year Orchid awarded my research team a grant of £131,156. It has made a real difference to our work. Without it, not only would there be fewer samples in the bank but much of the research work going on in the UK and further afield could not take place.

But we urgently need your support to ensure this vital work continues.

I hope that after reading about Sak Kudhetti's work, you will consider supporting our work in the coming year. Sak works in my team storing and analysing tissue for research. She has collected over 500 tissue samples since 2006. For The Trans-Atlantic Prostate Group we have together analysed over 21,600 separate pieces of tissue! We must ensure that her work and that done by the rest of my team is secure. Without it, not only would our research work suffer but the many research teams we work with would need to find other sources of tissue.

By making a donation today, you will ensure we can continue to make a real difference to the lives of thousands of men and their loved ones. A donation of £50 will enable us to collect, analyse and store one tumour tissue sample, £100 would provide 200 healthcare professionals with a specialist factsheet and leaflet on testicular cancer and £500 would enable us to test new biological markers on 1000 samples.

With cases of male cancer on the increase, the need for more research has never been more urgent. Your gift will help ensure the Orchid Tissue Bank continues to run for many years.

Thank you, on behalf of Orchid and my team for your support.

Yours sincerely



Dr Dan Berney FRCPath
Consultant and Honorary Reader in GU Pathology