May 8, 2006
Dana-Farber's new Center for Cancer Genome Discovery opens search for altered
genes in cancer
CCGD Director Matthew Meyerson (L) and member William Hahn (R)
At the heart of every cancer are broken genes.
Damaged or missing bits of DNA are the engines of cancer cells, but they also create chinks in tumors' defenses that can be attacked by cleverly designed drugs; recent successful examples are Gleevec, Herceptin, and Iressa, and more such "targeted" therapies are in the pipeline.
Responding to this growing frontier in cancer research, Dana-Farber has established a center committed to searching systematically through all the human genes potentially involved in cancer – the "cancer genome" – to detect genetic flaws or variations that underlie malignancies. The Center for Cancer Genome Discovery (CCGD) enables Dana-Farber to be an important contributor to the next generation of less-toxic designer drugs, which could transform cancer care.
The role of the center, says its director, Matthew Meyerson, MD, PhD, "is to support and encourage basic genome discovery that will help us discover new targets for treatment and to understand the diversity of cancer."
Adds William Hahn, MD, PhD, a center member, "This is an opportunity to describe all the structural changes in the cancer genome and to figure out which ones are important for patients, so that new therapeutics can be developed."
One of several centers
Under its new Strategic Plan, the Institute is establishing a number of innovative, multidisciplinary research centers, of which the CCGD is one. The center will collaborate closely with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, which has the large-scale resources to decipher the DNA in samples of human cancers and compare those sequences to normal DNA.
In recent years, Dana-Farber scientists have made important discoveries of gene mutations and damage to chromosomes that cause specific types of cancer, and of DNA alterations that determine how individual patients will respond to different drugs. The center builds on this research as well as on the Kinome Project, a Dana-Farber-Broad collaboration that has been sequencing the DNA of proteins in tumors known to act as jammed growth switches in cancer.
The CCGD also takes advantage of Dana-Farber's expertise in cancer genetics and biology, and its collection of tumor samples taken from patients with many kinds of cancer. Several of the CCGD scientists, including Hahn, Meyerson, Levi Garraway, MD, PhD, and Todd Golub, MD, are also affiliated with the Broad Institute. Other DFCI faculty participating in the CCGD are Massimo Loda, MD, Matthew Freedman, MD, and Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD.
A part of the center's mission will be working toward more effective clinical trial designs, in which patients with similar genetically defined cancers will receive drugs designed to hit those specific genetic targets. "We want to be on the forefront of clinical trials for new treatments," Meyerson emphasizes.
Barrett Rollins, MD, PhD, Dana-Farber's chief scientific officer, notes that the CCGD "plays an essential role in our Strategic Plan and in the overall scientific life of the Institute." As they identify and map new cancer-related gene alterations, the center's scientists will work with other integrative research centers to translate the findings into ideas for new treatments, he says.
In the wake of the successful Human Genome Project that in 2003 completed a read-out of the DNA sequences of all the "normal" genes, some cancer biologists proposed a similar effort to decipher DNA in all cancer-related genes. Last December, the federal government launched such a program, The Cancer Genome Atlas. As a first step, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is providing $100 million to develop and test the required technological tools in a few types of cancer and determine the feasibility of an all-out cancer genome project.
Not just CCGD members, but all Dana-Farber researchers will have access to "the technology powerhouse that is the Broad Institute" through the collaboration, Rollins says. "The potential benefits of this center to our science are almost limitless."
- Richard Saltus
Richard_Saltus@dfci.harvard.edu
