The Cancer Genome Atlas
For friends like Cary and Lori who have been struggling with cancer over the past several years, today’s news announcing the establishment of The Cancer Genome Atlas (note: the acronym TCGA are the letters of the DNA code) by the National Cancer Institute and National Human Genome Research Institute is an exciting one.
At this point, about 300 genes involved in cancer have been identified with a few drugs available that target specific genetic abnormalities. The plan is to analyze tumor samples from at least 50 types of cancer. Genes, genetic variations/mutations, duplications, deletions, etc. will be catalogued for eventual use in fine tuning cancer prognoses and treatment.
The project is not without detractors. Some scientists think TCGA will drain money from other research grants; $100 million will be spent over three years on a pilot phase. Others believe cancer cells are too heterogenous to analyze properly – even cells within the same tumor. But TCGA scientists say they will start by analyzing cancers that are known to have little variability.
Leave it to the Americans to act like they were the first to have this idea. The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute established a Cancer Genome Project in 2000.
Its goal is to identify mutations that occur in cancer cells to enable the development of new diagnostics and new treatments and advance our understanding of the biology of cancer.
The NIH’s TCGA is actually playing catch-up.
New York Times, December 13, 2005
Comments
One Response to “The Cancer Genome Atlas”Trackbacks
Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] Dr. Bernadine Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health, writes about the Cancer Genome Atlas in the January 9th issue of U.S. News & World Report. The Atlas should be the hottest thing in genome exploration since the map of the normal human genome was completed in 2003. But insecurity about a slow-growing NIH budget and a cultural bias against big science projects have frozen a bold-footed move into a tentative tiptoe: A three-year pilot studying only two to three as-yet-to-be-determined cancers (wait until that selection process starts!) will cost the National Cancer Institute $17 million of its annual $5 billion budget and the National Human Genome Research Institute an additional $17 million. Only if the pilot reaches unnamed milestones will the Atlas be stretched into a decade-long, billion-dollar study of 50 cancers–out of over 200. [...]