WASHINGTON – Federal health officials on Tuesday launched the biggest genetic research endeavor since the landmark human genome project: an ambitious effort to categorize all of the hundreds of molecular glitches that turn normal healthy cells into cancers.
The Cancer Genome Atlas, whose total cost could reach $1 billion or more, will for the first time direct the full force of today’s sophisticated genetic technologies to the thorough understanding of a single disease, one that will eventually strike nearly half of all Americans alive.
Leaders of the National Institutes of Health, which will administer the project through grants and contracts, predicted it would revolutionize the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of cancer, which will kill 564,000 Americans this year.
“This is really the beginning of a new era,” NIH Director Elias Zerhouni said at a news conference in Washington, flanked by researchers, doctors and patient advocates.
Although the rhetoric echoed that of Richard Nixon’s now-disparaged call for a war on cancer almost 35 years ago, Zerhouni and others emphasized that scientists have learned crucial lessons totally unknown at that time. Most centrally, it is now known that cancer is a genetic disease, caused by errors in a cell’s DNA that can be identified and targeted with molecular medicines.
By identifying the full spectrum of genetic errors that allows cancer cells to divide recklessly, spread and take root throughout the body, doctors hope to be able to classify every cancer – not by today’s crude measures of where it forms and how fast it is growing, but according to hidden molecular hallmarks that can tell which drugs will work and which ones will not.
The NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute and the National Cancer Institute will provide $100 million for a three-year pilot project to test the project’s feasibility.
A genetic map of everything that makes a cancer cell cancerous could speed the development of drugs that specifically target tumor cells’ Achilles’ heel. It could also lead to molecular imaging tools able to detect tumors when they are young, and provide clues about how to prevent them in the first place.
Some cancers are caused by a mutation in a single gene that normally keeps a cell from making offspring. Others are caused by the mistaken duplication of a gene that promotes normal cell division, boosting its reproductive capacity to abnormal levels.
In other cases, entire pieces of chromosomes – long, gene-bearing strands of DNA inside cells – break off and reattach to other chromosomes, inducing spurious and unregulated growth signals.
Still other cancers result when rogue molecules attach themselves to genes whose job is to control cell division. Such “epigenetic” changes are invisible on standard tests that look for mutated genes because the genes themselves are healthy but are being manhandled by the other molecules.
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