Researchers get $100m to study cancer genetics
A New York philanthropy is giving $100 million to the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard and four New York research centers to study the genetics of cancer, part of the push to transform the treatment of the disease by understanding its genetic makeup.
Scientists said the gift is one of the largest ever for cancer research.
``There is just an extraordinary opportunity in cancer research right now," said Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute, during a press conference yesterday announcing the award. ``The clinical and biological insights of the last decade and a half have really pointed us to where the problems are."
Executives at The Starr Foundation, established in 1955 by businessman Cornelius Vander Starr, said their only restriction for the money is that the five entities collaborate on projects, because they believe that scientists will find cures faster than if they work only with colleagues at their own institutions.
The other members of the consortium are Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University, and Weill Medical College of Cornell University.
The grant comes on the heels of a $100 million pilot project called the Cancer Genome Atlas, in which scientists will begin to map the genetic abnormalities that give rise to lung, brain, and ovarian cancer. That project is funded by the National Institutes of Health and involves using tumor samples from lung cancer patients who have been treated at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
Scientists in the Starr Cancer Consortium said they will have a broader mission, not only looking for genetic mutations in specific types of tumors, but also building better tools to study the genetics of cancer. They said the projects they will undertake, which they have not chosen yet, generally will be riskier than the Cancer Genome Atlas; success will be more uncertain, and therefore government funding for these projects would be harder to obtain.
Both projects are part of an effort to dramatically change the way cancer patients are treated. Enthusiasm for this new approach is building, both because the technology required to study the genetic makeup of cancer has become cheaper and more accessible, and because of the success of several drugs developed using this model. Targeted drugs such as Gleevec for certain forms of leukemia and gastrointestinal tumors, and Herceptin for breast cancer, are helping thousands of patients with specific faulty genes by interfering with the function of those genes.
Scientists in the Starr Cancer Consortium said they will meet in November to discuss and possibly choose projects. Lander and Dr. Todd Golub, director of the Cancer Project at the Broad Institute, said possible projects include defining the genetic mutations in sarcomas, and then going beyond that to discover which of the genes the cancer absolutely needs in order to multiply; those genes may be the best targets for new drugs. Another possibility is for researchers to develop tumors in mice that more closely resemble those in humans, as a way to study how the cancers respond to different types of therapy.
``The benefit to cancer patients is going to be reaped over the next decade," said Bruce Stillman, president of Cold Spring Harbor. ``We won't come up with a magic bullet. But we will whittle down individual cancers bit by bit."
