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Purdue-IU join cancer detection effort
September 28, 2006The National Cancer Institute, a division of the National Institutes of Health, has announced plans for a $104 million, five-year initiative aimed at providing early diagnosis of cancer.
As part of the plan, five Clinical Proteomic Technology Assessment for Cancer teams at universities across the country will work together to unlock the possibilities of the protein-based science.
Purdue University, in a joint effort with the Indiana University School of Medicine, will lead one of the centers with $8 million in funding from the institute.
Leland Hartwell is director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and a Nobel laureate. He has collaborated with the Cancer Institute on the plan, which aims to create best practices for identifying proteins that may act as biomarkers of cancer.
"I became a cancer center director about 10 years ago. As I became more aware of the needs of patients, I became very excited about the opportunities of early detection of cancer to save lives," Hartwell said. "Roughly one-third of cancer patients now die of their disease because their cancer was detected too late."
Fred Regnier, a distinguished professor of analytical chemistry at Purdue, will serve as the principal investigator on Purdue and IU's research team.
"It's not an issue of 'Do we have markers?' " said Regnier. "It's 'Do we have technology available that will allow us to find patterns of markers and validate them in a 1,000 or so patients at a time?' "
Using samples from more than 200 breast cancer patients across Indiana, Regnier's team will work with IU to scan samples for proteins indicative of cancer.
If researchers can identify, map and later easily scan patients for these biomarkers, the speed with which cancer is diagnosed could ramp up exponentially.
The National Cancer Institute is also urging the five centers to work together to find best practices that will allow results to be reproduced at any number of facilities, adding needed guidelines and stability to the field.
Charles Buck, director of operations at the Bindley Bioscience Center in Discovery Park, said using biomarkers to detect cancer in its earliest stages could have a major impact on other genetically based diseases.
"It's certainly our intention that what we are able to define and describe in this cancer biomarker effort will be applied in other diseases," Buck said.
Research using proteomics is already under way for diabetes, osteoporosis and arthritis.
Buck said the challenge will be using today's advanced technology to discover how proteins behave in the cancer process and how those changes can be used as indicators of the disease.
Like most scientists, he doesn't like giving a time frame, but said he hopes to see biomarker tracing systems for cancer in the clinical setting within the next decade.
For those suffering from cancer, his optimism could inspire hope and he hopes