[AlvinofDiaspar]

From the Star:

Toronto gets lead role in huge cancer project
April 30, 2008

Megan Ogilvie
HEALTH REPORTER


More than any other time in this city’s history, world-class scientists are flocking to our labs en masse with the hope of cracking medical mysteries.

Yesterday, Ontario researchers announced they will take a lead role with the International Cancer Genome Consortium, one of the largest global research efforts since the Human Genome Project. Within 10 years, the consortium plans to map the genetic mutations that drive 50 of the most common cancers.
Delving into cancer genomes will help scientists understand the complex biological mechanisms that cause cancers to grow and spread

Experts say it will likely lead to new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent the disease.

And just last week, a Toronto-led team of stem cell scientists reported a critical breakthrough towards one day using stem cells to repair damaged heart tissue.
Many of the city’s top scientists, from oncologists to statisticians, stem cell whizzes to genome experts, have been recruited to Toronto within the last two years. They have come from big city hospitals, Ivy League institutions and international research hubs.

And they say Toronto has become a magnet for the best because of new government money earmarked for innovation, a collegial atmosphere among colleagues, and a critical mass of scientists that lures others to tricked-out labs stacked along University Ave.

“There are, I think, somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 researchers in the biomedical field here,” said Dr. John McPherson, director of the cancer genome program at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and himself a new recruit. “There are 5,000 labs within a 20-minute walk of OICR. . . . There are some other places like this in the world, but they are very few.”


McPherson, who landed in Toronto in July from Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine, will lead the province’s plan to map the genetic mutations involved in pancreatic cancer. While another recruit, Dr. Lincoln Stein, a world leader in genome informatics, will lead from Toronto the consortium’s data coordination centre — predicted to be the largest health informatics database in the world.

"There is a real collaborative spirit here that I haven’t seen in other places,” said McPherson about Toronto’s research community. “It’s this collaboration that really drives research these days.”

The scientists involved with the International Cancer Genome Consortium
say a combined global assault on cancer is the best way to halt the world’s leading killer. Last year, more than 7.5 million people worldwide died of the disease and more than 12 million new cases were diagnosed.

Cataloguing the genetic mutations involved in 50 types of cancer is too large a project to be undertaken by one country alone, said Dr. Tom Hudson, president and scientific director of OICR and an executive member of the consortium’s interim executive committee.

The 10-year project will generate 25,000 times more data than the Human Genome Project, said Hudson, who was involved in leading that landmark project.

Not only will the consortium boost understanding of how different cancers grow, Hudson said it may also help pinpoint environmental factors, including viruses, that contribute to cancers.

Research organizations that join the consortium sign on to study one specific type of cancer and must contribute at least $20 million to sequence 500 unique samples. Members must also agree to rapidly release data to the public and not make intellectual property claims on their findings.
Ten countries have already enlisted, including China, France, Japan, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. Hudson expects others to join soon.

Researchers from India which has higher rates of oral cancers, will tackle that particular cancer type. The U.S. has agreed to look at lung cancer, among others.

Hudson said Ontario researchers wanted to tackle the “very tough” pancreatic cancer. “It has improved the least in its survival rates in the last 20 years and the mortality rate is very high, close to 98 per cent.”
McPherson, who will head up the project, said sequencing pancreatic cancer will uncover the early stages of the disease.

And, he added, it may also reveal why pancreatic cancer cells are resistant to chemotherapy.

“The DNA in all tumours is different than the DNA of the normal tissue next to it,” he said. “We’re trying to catalogue all of those variants to see what is different about the tissue. From that we can hopefully determine what is the mechanism that causes the cancer.”

In 2005, the Ontario government launched OICR with a five-year, $347-million budget to speed up cancer research from the lab to bedside. And recently the institute pledged $30 millio n to help build the cancer genomics atlas.

Speaking at MaRS yesterday, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty committed $10 million over the next decade to the consortium.

“Competition was fierce,” said McGuinty, noting Ontario was the only “sub-national” jurisdiction competing to work on the massive undertaking.

Toronto is now North America’s fourth-largest biomedical research centre and the sector is growing by 18 per cent each year.

Today’s announcement means Ontario will remain at the forefront of cancer research and that’s good news for families. One in three Ontarians are now being diagnosed with cancer. One in four Ontarians are dying of cancer,” he said.

Some of the $10 million will go towards storing and organizing the massive amounts of data generated by the consortium.

“We need one large data set that researchers can mine for relationships among many distinct types of cancers, rather than a hundred small, unconnected databases that disguise the commonality among the information,” Stein said.

“It is very powerful to put the information together in an integrated way because you can start to see relationships between cancers.”

With files from Robert Benzie

http://healthzone.ca/health/article/419916

AoD

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

And the Globe:

Ontario takes lead in global genetic war with cancer
Ten countries to join in research project to detect and defeat the mutations that drive 50 different malignancies
CAROLYN ABRAHAM

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

April 30, 2008 at 1:20 AM EDT

Research groups from 10 countries are undertaking an unprecedented global effort to combat cancer, one of the world's leading killers, they announced Tuesday.

The collaborative project, dubbed the International Cancer Genome Consortium, will hunt the genetic mutations that drive 50 different types of cancer — from breast to bone. The consortium, in which Canada will play a lead role, plans to share results rapidly, widely and freely so scientists can quickly develop new diagnostic tests and treatments.

Each member country plans to spend roughly $20-million (U.S.) tackling at least one subtype of the disease, collecting specimen samples from 500 patients, and studying the genetic glitches they find in their cancerous cells. With 50 cancers to be studied, not all of them have been assigned a country yet.

But China, for example, intends to study liver cancer, because the country has particularly high rates of that disease. Japan will take on gastric cancer. India has an interest in oral cancers, France in sarcomas — cancers of the bone and connective tissue. Several countries will focus on breast cancers, including Britain and the United States, where research groups are also interested in brain and colon cancers.

Canada, which is to store, crunch and share all the data, will take on the pancreas.

"We picked a hard one," said Tom Hudson, scientific director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto, which will be the project's home base as the ICGC Secretariat. "There's been research [into pancreatic cancer] but not much success. There's just no survivor community."

Dr. Hudson, who has helped to spearhead the consortium, noted pancreatic cancer is the 12th-most-common form of the disease, but one of the deadliest. More than 98 per cent of patients die within six months of diagnosis.

"In 2008, there will be 3,800 new cases and 3,700 deaths in Canada," Dr. Hudson said. "It's almost always found too late."

The consortium has come together in a whirlwind of meetings, conference calls and funding commitments during the past six months, driven by swift advances in computing technology that allow researchers to rapidly read DNA. It is expected to amass 25,000 times more data than the international Human Genome Project, which produced the first draft sequence of human DNA in 2001.

Deoxyribonucleic acid, the three-billion-chemical base-pair code that contains the operating instructions for human life, can be found in the nucleus of nearly every cell in the body. In cancer cells, however, that genetic code can be riddled with hundreds of mistakes, spawning cells that can multiply madly into tumours.

"We know when you look at cancer cells, there can be thousands of mutations in that tumour cell … that were not inherited," Dr. Hudson said. Specifically, he added, scientists are chasing the "driver mutations" that allow a cancer to grow and spread and these are often different in varying types of cancers.

Dr. Hudson estimates the consortium will run a 10-year effort, but "we don't have to wait 10 years [for a result], we will release it as we find it." The results will be made available to researchers worldwide.

The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, with a five-year, provincially funded budget of $347-million, plans to spend $30-million on the project.

At a news conference yesterday morning, however, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said the province will contribute an additional $10-million to fund the OICR's role as Secretariat.

Mr. McGuinty noted that Ontario, as a sub-national government, beat out the United States and Britain to lead the ICGC, and is essentially punching above its weight. "Cancer is devastating to families and that's why we're doing all we can to help save lives," he said. "This investment puts Ontario at the forefront of international research that will save lives around the world."

The money has so far allowed the institute to purchase 10 ultra-fast DNA-sequencing machines and lure top talent from the United States to take on the task. Among those recruited to Toronto, Dr. Hudson said, are Lincoln Stein, a pathologist and "bio-informatics guru" from Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., who will head the Data Co-ordination Centre. John McPherson, a Canadian scientist returning home from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, is director of the OICR Cancer Genome Program.

Dr. Hudson said it is hoped federally funded Genome Canada will contribute more money for the project, which would allow Canadian researchers to study other cancers, namely those of the brain and ovaries. "We don't want the pancreas to be the only one we do," he said.

Dr. Hudson is no stranger to science on a massive scale, having played an early role in the Human Genome Project, and the international Hap Map, which was the first effort to chart genetic differences among four of the world's major ethnic populations. Duplicating efforts by studying the same cancer types in different countries is crucial, he said, because "tumours of the colon look different in Singapore than they do in Toronto."

Researchers suspect environmental, dietary and genetic differences can have an impact on the way cancers develop in different regions of the world.

More countries are expected to join the consortium in the coming months. The list so far includes: Australia, Canada, China, Europe, France, India, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.

With reports from Murray Campbell and Karen Howlett

AoD

 

[ITcomputer]

but, but we are becoming a have not province!

Some banker said so!

 

[yyzer]

Great news for Toronto..

 

[JasonParis]

Even if Ontario went "have not" Toronto never will.

 

[Observer Walt]

I realize that research labs don't equate to tourist attractions, but guess which is more likely to make this city "world class"? Great news indeed for Toronto.