The quest for personalised cancer treatments has been given a boost by the announcement of a GBP8.5m ($13m) UK-US alliance to find the best treatments for cancers.
The five-year project, funded by a Strategic Award from the Wellcome Trust, is to be conducted by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, near Cambridge, UK, and Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Boston, USA.
The project is co-led by Professor Mike Stratton FRS and Dr Andy Futreal of the Sanger Institute, and Professors Jeff Settleman, PhD and Daniel Haber, MD, PhD of Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.
The scientists will use their skills in high-throughput research to test the sensitivity of 1,000 cancer cell samples to hundreds of known and recently discovered molecular anticancer treatments and correlate these responses to the genes known to be driving the cancers.
Their results will give a catalogue of the most promising treatments or combinations of treatments for each of the cancer types based on the specific genetic alterations in these cancers.
This information will then be used for more informative clinical trials, aiding the introduction of more targeted agents into the clinic.
'Cancer remains a disease that affects directly one in three of the world's population,' says Professor Mike Stratton.
'But we have new tools that we can bring to bear.
'Our emerging understanding of cancer mutations allied to our abilities to carry out large-scale research means we can develop screening techniques to find the most effective treatments for a whole variety of cancers.' The teams will make extensive use of the genetic information being produced by the Sanger Institute Cancer Genome Project to draw the important correlations between anti-cancer agent response and the catalogue of genetic abnormalities known in each sample.
The experimental work will be split equally between the two collaborating institutions, but will harness the previous experience in experimental exposure of cells to molecular treatments at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and the skills in large-scale genomics, sequencing and informatics at the Sanger Institute.
'Targeted cancer drugs have emerged in recent years as an important new class of anti-cancer agents, and can yield dramatic clinical responses in some cancers.
'We hope to improve our ability to direct these drugs to the patients that are most likely to benefit,' explains Professor Settleman.
'Previous pre-clinical experimental studies of such agents have typically examined their activity in a small number of cancer-derived cell lines, providing little opportunity to determine where they will be truly effective in the clinic.
'The collaborative study will make use of a very large collection of cancer cell lines of known genetic composition to identify genomic features that underlie drug sensitivity.
'Such information will be of tremendous value in informing the design of clinical trials for new candidate anti-cancer drugs and for making treatment decisions between available drugs.' Cell lines are grown artificially - in culture - and are originally derived from naturally occurring human cancer tumours.
This study will use publicly available cell lines, allowing other investigators to replicate and develop further the results.
The findings of the programme will be validated in clinical specimens and will subsequently inform the design of clinical studies to examine patient response against the genetic information.
