History & Mission Statement

Sentinel Lymph Node Working Group (SLNWG), which consists of about 20 investigators from over 15 major cancer centers. The primary goal of the Group is to collect data and to maintain follow-up data including melanoma and other cancer patients undergoing selective sentinel lymph node dissection or other cancer treatments to generate peer-reviewed publications and therapeutic protocols. The Group is also involved in multi-center cooperative effort relating to highly focused biologic or therapeutic studies for patients with melanoma and other types of cancer relating to sentinel node technology and cancer metastasis

Mission Statement

The mission of the Sentinel Node Oncology Foundation (SNOF) is to advance the care and treatment of patients with solid cancer and to help develop new preventative strategies, diagnostics, and treatments.

About

With advancements in cancer care and treatment, cancer survivors today live longer and enjoy a vastly improved quality of life than thought imaginable.  Recent discovery has found that the sentinel lymph node in the body is the gateway for cancer to spread.  Therefore, the Sentinel Node Oncology Foundation was created in 2003 on the premise that the next level of cancer research and treatment is upon us to understand more about this important gateway.  It is now known that the same type of cancer is different from one person to the other.  The genetic signature of cancer of each patient may be determined so that treatment can be tailored to each cancer patient more precisely and efficiently.  The Foundation is building a robust sentinel lymph node databank so that the natural history of patients with solid cancer can be accurately defined by their genetic profiles.  The Foundation has unified cancer specialists working together to reach its goals through research and clinical trials.  We have over 20 members and have collected research data from over 3500 patients to date, one of the largest databases in the sentinel lymph node era.

We are now in the process of analyzing numerous data points that might lead to information that can help us determine the chances of survival for different patients diagnosed with cancer.  In this way, we can subgroup them to give them the most appropriate treatment.  Further, we are planning to build a specimen bank to establish a genetic profile of each cancer patient.  This would lead to more precise treatment recommendations and the avoidance of severe toxic effects from over treatment.