Cancer Genome Atlas Awards Funds for Technology Development

As part of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) pilot project, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH; Bethesda, MD, USA) recently awarded eight two-year grants totaling US$3.4 million to support the development of innovative technologies for exploring the genomic underpinnings of cancer.

The U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), both part of NIH, announced the TCGA pilot in December 2005 to evaluate the feasibility of a large-scale, systematic approach to identifying the changes that occur in the genomes of cancer cells. The goal is to generate genomic information that the research community can utilize to develop new and improved strategies for detecting, treating and, ultimately, preventing cancer.

The types of tumors being assessed in the pilot include brain cancer (glioblastoma), ovarian cancer, and lung cancer (squamous cell), which together account for more than 200,000 cases of cancer in the United States each year. "In addition to the detailed genomic data it will generate, there is great hope that TCGA will both advance technological development and drive down its cost,” said NCI director John E. Niederhuber, M.D. "Our greatest challenge will be in applying the volumes of information TCGA will provide about tumors to the genomic data NCI is gathering from large cohorts of patients, in order to better predict, and even prevent, the earliest development of cancer.”

"Cancer poses a very complex challenge. Each of the dozens of types of cancer likely will have a different genomic profile or set of profiles. We urgently need tools equal to this task,” said NHGRI director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., whose institute led the NIH component of the Human Genome Project. "One of the major lessons we learned from the Human Genome Project is that technology development is essential for success.”

Some of the institutions and principal investigators chosen to receive the two-year grants include: Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, TX, USA); Aleksandar Milosavljevic, Ph.D.; $413,000; Comprehensive High-Throughput Mapping of Cancer Genomes. This project will develop methods to utilize new highly parallel DNA sequencing platforms to investigate structural variations in the genomes of cancer cells.

City of Hope/Beckman Research Institute (Duarte, CA, USA); Gerd Pfeifer, Ph.D.; $465,000; DNA Methylation in Cancer Genomes. These researchers will work on approaches for analyzing the methylation of DNA at high resolution across the genome using 1,000 cancer cells. Methylation, which involves the addition of methyl groups to the backbone of the DNA molecule, can change the way in which genes interact with the transcriptional machinery that activates and inactivates genes.

Columbia University (New York, NY, USA); Benjamin Tycko, M.D., Ph.D.; $443,000; Genomic and Epigenomic Profiling by MSNP. This team will focus on using high-density oligonucleotide arrays to characterize genomic aberrations and DNA methylation. Oligonucleotides are short sequences of single-stranded DNA or RNA that are frequently used as probes for detecting complementary DNA or RNA because they bind readily to their complements.

The pilot project will establish a publicly available integrated database that individual researchers can use to study the genomic changes of specific cancers to develop new targets for a new generation of drugs and diagnostics. TCGA data will be made available through public databases supported by NCI's cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) and the U.S. National Library of Medicine's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).


Related Links:
The Cancer Genome Atlas
National Institutes of Health