The Cancer Genome Project: Making a difference
The discovery that the BRAF gene is mutated in 60-70 per cent of malignant melanomas and 10-15 per cent of colorectal cancers is today yielding drugs to block the BRAF protein and thus treat melanoma. This includes a Trust-funded drug discovery programme to develop inhibitors at the Institute of Cancer Research. In June 2010, it was confirmed that BRAF is an important drug target for malignant melanoma.
The advancements in DNA sequencing technology and in our knowledge of cancer genetics holds out the promise of developing targeted, personalised treatments for cancer. A five-year Cancer Translation Project, funded by a Strategic Award to Professor Mike Stratton and Dr Andy Frutreal of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Professors Jeff Settleman, PhD and Daniel Haber, MD, PhD of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, USA at the end of 2008, is making extensive use of the genetic information being produced to draw the important correlations between anti-cancer agent response and the catalogue of genetic abnormalities known in each sample.
The outcome of this ambitious drug profiling effort will yield a description of which genetic alterations found in a broad spectrum of tumours predict response to which of approximately 400 anticancer treatments being investigated. This will inform targeted clinical trials where patients will be given different treatments depending on the genotype of the mutated cancer cells.
The data produced by the Project is made available for global use by other researchers via a set of resources, such as the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC) which is now in its 47th release. Visit the Project's pages at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Insitute website to see them all.
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