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Clinical Proteomics Technologies for Cancer

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Coordination with TCGA

There are at least 200 forms of cancer, and many more subtypes. Each of these is caused by errors in DNA that cause cells to grow uncontrolled. Identifying the changes in each cancer’s complete set of DNA – its genome – and understanding how such changes interact to drive the disease will lay the foundation for improving cancer prevention, early detection and treatment.  To begin to address the great heterogeneity of cancer the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) began The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) as a three-year pilot in 2006.

The TCGA pilot project confirmed that an atlas of genomic changes could be created for each specific cancer types. It also showed that a national network of research and technology teams working on distinct but related projects could pool the results of their efforts, create an economy of scale and develop an infrastructure for making the data publicly accessible and proved that making the data freely available would enable researchers anywhere around the world to make and validate important discoveries. The success of the pilot led the National Institutes of Health to commit major resources to TCGA to collect and characterize more than 20 additional tumor types.  Currently, TCGA is analyzing these cancer types through a network of investigators throughout the country. Each cancer type undergoes a comprehensive genomic characterization and analysis. The data that is generated by TCGA’s network approach is then made freely available and widely used by to the cancer community through the TCGA Data Portal.

In order to further translate finding from the TCGA project, the NCI launched the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) in 2011 to characterize the proteomic content of the tumors analyzed by TCGA investigators. Currently, the CPTAC program is in the process of applying its standardized proteomic technologies to comprehensively interrogate these tumors using genomic insights to further our understanding of cancer biology at the protein level. The hope is to improve our ability to diagnose, treat and prevent cancer.  The two programs coordinate activities through periodic joint sessions and open data sharing.

For more information about The Cancer Genome Atlas visit: http://cancergenome.nih.gov/.