The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) has reported that The Side-Out Foundation, a Virginia-based non-profit that supports advances in therapy for cancer patients, has donated $160,000 to the I-SPY 2 breast cancer clinical trial.

The I-SPY 2 trial, launched in 2010 by the FNIH Biomarkers Consortium, is a groundbreaking clinical study that is testing new individually targeted breast cancer drugs in patients diagnosed with localized, aggressive cancers.

A major goal of the I-SPY 2 trial is identifying specific molecular signatures (biomarkers) in cancerous tumors that can predict how a patient will respond to a particular therapy. The grant from Side-Out will be used to perform a set of novel genetic tests that can help measure which drugs will be most beneficial for women with different types of tumors.