New Weapon In Cancer War: Genetic Mapping Technology
If you could unravel the DNA codes of different types of cancer, you ought to be able to target the cellular mutations that cause the disease.
So who's going to do it -- and where will the money come from?
Scientists at leading U.S. institutions have a plan to get things moving. People in the business of cancer drug discovery hope they'll get it right.
A panel of experts commissioned by the National Cancer Institute proposes spending $1.35 billion to get the research going on a grand and global scale. It made its recommendations at the end of March.
Thanks to work from the U.K.'s Sanger Institute and the completed Human Genome Project, DNA mapping technology can now be applied to patients and diseases.
"The application phase requires larger-scale science than the discovery phase. To apply the technology to human cancers in patient settings requires teams of investigators, standards and controls," said Dr. Leland Hartwell, a Nobel laureate and president of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He co-chaired the NCI's panel.
Once the project gets going, it will have a ripple effect beyond the biotech sector, says Vijay Samant, president and chief executive of Vical Inc. (NasdaqNM:VICL - News).
His company does DNA-based cancer and infectious disease research. And that ripple should last 15 to 20 years.
"When you do clinical trials, you need contract research organizations to organize them," Samant said. "It's a big business opportunity for them."
Biological contract manufacturers also will also benefit, Samant says. Hospitals that host the trials will find themselves earning new revenue as well. So will medical equipment makers.
"It's the multiplier effect," Samant said. "It's not just biotech but all the infrastructure."
'More Targeted'
The NCI project is expected to take nine years. It'll be more complicated than the broader Human Genome Project, says Dr. Harold Varmus, president and chief executive of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
"Everything's much more targeted with the genes implicated in cancer," Varmus said. "There's surgery involved. The important aspect is procurement of tissues. We need specimen centers to provide high-quality samples, carefully ascertained to be the right diagnosis."
The committee's long-term idea is to analyze, or sequence, 12,500 tumor samples -- 250 each from the 50 most common cancer types. The $1.35 billion projected cost assumes that the cost of DNA will come down dramatically from today's $1 million per tumor specimen.
Sampling tumors raises other problems.
"We must distinguish between genetic defects people inherit that predispose them to cancer and cancers that come from cell change in latter lifetime," Hartwell said. "My own opinion is that we should do a proof-of-principle project: take one cancer type at one site and show the value of this project."
He voices more enthusiasm about molecular diagnostics, which involves looking at proteins and DNA and comparing those with normal cells to find differences that cause cancer.
This approach could lead to earlier detection or discovery of a person's predisposition to cancer.
Money remains the problem. The National Institutes of Health spent $3 billion on the Human Genome Project, but 90% of that was spent to create the technology. And that's the only supersize project the NIH has ever done, Hartwell says.
Samant's solution? Let the private sector pay. He isn't keen on NIH funding.
"It comes with strings attached and adds levels of bureaucracy," he said.
Big pharmaceutical companies are sitting on piles of money offshore, Samant says, putting the figure at $10 billion. He suggests that the 10 biggest drug makers each put up $150 million for the Cancer Genome Project.
"In return they'd get preferential access to technology or gene sequences," he said.
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