Mission:  

The Windber/Walter Reed Medical Center Clinical Breast Care Project will help lead the way into the 21st Century in the crusade against breast disorders. The project will utilize a multidisciplinary approach as the standard of care for treating breast diseases and breast cancer. This multidisciplinary model integrates prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment and continuing care, but the project is further unique in the incorporation of advances in risk reduction, informatics, tissue banking and research. These efforts will focus on decreasing the morbidity and mortality of breast cancer among American women.

Click Here to view and download posters describing the CBCP Mission.  
(Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view a downloaded poster)

Scope:   

The Clinical Breast Care Project (CBCP) will encompass the facilities, resources and expertise of the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS), the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC), the Windber Medical Center (WMC) and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation (HJF). The CBCP will foster a collaborative and collegial working relationship with cited partners, other government agencies, academic institutions, commercial industry leaders, and non-profit organizations. The CBCP will have a five pronged-interlocking approach based on the five pillars: Risk Reduction, Research, Tissue Bank, Informatics, and Clinical Care.

Goals:

• Ultimate Goal: Decrease morbidity and mortality of breast cancer among American Women. Through the interlacing of the five pillars, the CBCP will help lead the crusade against breast disorders.
  

• Develop a comprehensive breast care center/system to enable health care providers with a multidisciplinary team approach that works towards the common goal.
  

• Empower women with breast cancer and other breast disorders with the decision-making tools and environment to enhance quality of life and to meet psychosocial needs of the patients and their families.

Executive Summary – Windber / Walter Reed Clinical Breast Care Project (CBCP):

• The Clinical Breast Care Project (CBCP) is the outcome of Congressional appropriations and consists of extensive collaborative effort between Windber Medical Center (Windber, PA – 12^th Congressional District of the Honorable John Murtha) and Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
  

• There have been multiple ongoing interactions and visits from the Walter Reed personnel to the Windber site and vice versa since the inception of the project.  There was a significant full two-day retreat attended by all personnel from the Walter Reed and Windber sites which was held 10 – 12 Dec 2000, in Shepherdstown, WV.  At this retreat a tremendous amount of clinical, research, and collaborative work and relationship building was achieved.  Our distinguished guest was Mrs. Joyce Murtha (wife of the Congressman) who was briefed by the Director, CBCP, on the vision and success to date of the project. Another Offsite retreat for the CBCP was held in December 2001 and included the inaugural meeting of the CBCP Scientific Advisory Board.
  

• The five pillars of the CBCP of Walter Reed/Windber are clinical care, tissue banking, risk reduction, informatics, and focused research (breast cancer vaccine development, and genomics and proteomics).
  

• The clinical care pillar was established by building state of the art breast care facilities at the Windber and Walter Reed sites. The Walter Reed Breast Center opened on July 31, 2001, and the Joyce Murtha Breast Center at Windber on February 21, 2002.
  

• The tissue banking piece was established at both sites in collaboration and entails acquisitions, storage, and movement amongst the sites for research purposes of tissue garnered from all breast surgeries being preformed at both locations. All tissue banking and research is done on protocols approved through multiple IRBs for maximum patient protection.
  

• The informatics piece is resulting in a mutual Walter Reed and Windber collaborative development of a high-end breast disease database, which will be a unique resource for all investigators. This is being developed in close collaboration with leading industry leaders in the high-end database field, specifically Cimmaron Software Developers.
  

• The risk reduction pillar is a vital portion of this mutual project which has resulted in the capability of the project to establish a screening program to identify women who are at high risk of developing breast cancer, and to enter them into a very time- and resource-intensive risk reduction program which can only be appropriately resourced through an appropriation such as this, to decrease significantly these patients’ chance of getting breast cancer in the future.
  

• The research aspect is centered on two main areas: breast cancer vaccine development, and functional genomic/microarrays/proteomics global expression profiling analysis of the tissue which is acquired as described above.  Both Windber and Walter Reed have mutually and cooperatively set-up the breast cancer vaccine program and that is now being offered at both sites, which is a unique project nationally as well.  The collaborative research on the functional genomics is being established through a high-end microarray, genomics, and proteomics facility at the CBCP Windber Research Institute (WRI) and will be used as the prime research center for the tissue collaborations which are developed through this project.
  

• An important outgrowth of this effort is and will be the bringing of more patients into the Windber and Walter Reed sites for breast treatments, specifically the vaccine programs; also, the economic development at Windber is being enhanced through job creation and establishment of the scientific research center (WRI).
  

• Direct Army Relevance: Nearly 20% of the Active Duty Army Force is female. In addition, the majority of the remaining male Active Duty members, are married. Breast health issues and breast cancer detection, research, and treatment, are taking on a greater urgency to maintain the health and morale of the Army. The Comprehensive Breast Center at Walter Reed, opened on July 31, 2001, is the U.S. Army’s first and only stand-alone Breast Center, and features a state-of-the-art facility incorporating the finest technology and research with a warm and welcoming atmosphere of caring.
  

• In summary the Clinical Breast Care Project, a collaborative effort between Walter Reed and Windber, is moving quickly, has resulted in excellent working relationships and collaborations between the two sites on all five of the project’s main aspects, results in at least monthly face-to-face communications and interactions between personnel of both sites, and undergoes annual large scale offsite meetings in December which are highly productive and tremendously useful.  The project is achieving its goals and looks forward to further continuance of this great vision and what will be a national resource, into the future.

Click here for a descriptive background of the CBCP.

This page was last updated on 01/18/07.