Gene project would seek keys to cancer

Federal officials are planning to compile a comprehensive catalog of the genetic abnormalities that characterize cancer, in hopes of discovering important new clues about how to diagnose, prevent, and treat cancer, according to a report in today's issues of The New York Times.

The proposed Human Cancer Genome Project would be greater in scale than the Human Genome Project, which has already mapped the blueprint of the human genetic structure. Its goal woudl be to determine the DNA sequence of thousands of tumor samples, the Times reported, Researchers would look for mutations that give rise to cancer or sustain it.

The project's proponents say a data bank of mutations would be freely available to researchers.

''Knowing the defects of the cancer cell points you to the Achilles' heel of tumors," Dr. Eric S. Lander, director of the Broad Institute, a research center in Cambridge, told the newspaper.

The project is projected to cost about $1.35 billion over nine years; funding sources are currently uncertain. The government would probably start with smaller pilot projects, officials said.

The proposal was presented last month to an advisory committee to the National Cancer Institute. It was drawn up by a group led by Lander and Dr. Leland H. Hartwell, a Nobel laureate who is president of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

They and others say the time is right for such a project because the Human Genome Project has provided the human DNA sequence, with which tumor cells could be compared. In addition, the cost of such research is dropping. And discoveries of individual cancer-related genes have already helped lead to new drugs.