biomedical research

She’s a force of nature, and she’s back on Mendelspod. A decade ago, Carolyn Compton was hired by the NCI to solve a problem that has plagued the world of not just cancer research, but all of biomedical research. To this day, there are no standards in place for the acquisition, collection, storage, and delivery of human biological samples used for research. The leader of the NIH has acknowledged that this is a major part of biology’s non-reproducibility problem.

Yet Carolyn couldn’t solve it at the NCI. It took going to Arizona state where as part of the National Biomarker Development Alliance, she brought all of the stakeholders, government institutions, patients, private companies, and perhaps most importantly, the professional organizations such as CAP or the College of American Pathologists together, to put what in today’s program she calls “a basic floor” in place.

It was like the story of the blind men and the elephant.

"Despite the backgrounds of this broad swath of stakeholders who came to the conference—patients and regulators and scientists and physicians—they all had a certain knowledge of what was important. They all had knowledge of a certain part of the elephant, but they didn’t see the big picture until we came together. And what we came up with was astoundingly cohesive,” she says.

What has happened since? What changes has Carolyn seen toward the adoption of better standards and improving this immense problem that she simply calls, “garbage in, garbage out.”

We come in at around 25 min today.

You can find Carolyn’s referenced (free) article for Pathologist Magazine here.