When two women—a patient advocate and a scientist—embarked on a mission to collect “normal” breast tissue for comparative purposes, colleagues in oncology dismissed their idea as wild.
In the early 2000s, Connie Rufenbarger, a breast cancer patient advocate, and Anna Maria Storniolo, a professor of clinical medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine and a member of the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer Research Laboratories, were attending a meeting in Indianapolis when they realized that oncologists had no source of “true normal” breast tissue to use as control in studies.