January 27, 2010(USA TODAY) -- Two leading medical centers on Monday launched the largest effort to date to find all of the genetic mutations that cause childhood cancer.
Doctors at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis say the three-year, $65 million project could help them develop new treatments for pediatric cancer, which strikes more 10,000 American children under age 14 every year.
"For the first time in history, we have the tools to identify all of the genetic abnormalities that turn a white blood cell into a leukemia cell or a brain cell into a brain tumor," says William Evans, chief executive officer at St. Jude. "We're going to be able to look at cancer in a way we've never been able to do. It will be like going from a pair of glasses to a microscope."
The privately funded project will complement the Cancer Genome Atlas, an eight-year National Institutes of Health initiative focusing largely on adult malignancies, says NIH director Francis Collins, who notes that pediatric and adult tumors may have mostly different genetic roots.
"The long-term dream is that this will uncover a list of powerful new drug strategies that we didn't know about," Collins says.
Scientists will draw on tissues samples taken from 600 young patients treated at St. Jude, sequencing all the DNA from their tumors and normal cells, Evans says.
Scientists will take a "whole genome approach," looking not just at the children's 20,000 or so genes but also at long stretches of DNA between genes. This material -- once called "junk DNA" -- makes up 98.5% of the genome and may influence how genes are turned on and off, Collins says.
Once scientists confirm that their results are reliable, they will make them publicly available, Evans says.
The St. Jude-Washington University collaboration dwarfs pediatric genome research even by the federal government. The National Cancer Institute is spending $25 million over the next two years on pediatric genome research, says Malcolm Smith, associate branch chief for pediatrics.
Discovering the genes that cause cancer is only part of the battle, however, says Susan Weiner of the Children's Cause for Cancer Advocacy. She notes that pediatric cancer is considered an "orphan disease" with too few patients to attract much drug company investment.
The cancer institute and St. Jude hope to jump-start this research. Using the results of their genome research, the institutions would be willing to take on much of the earliest drug development work -- the stage with the greatest financial risk and the lowest chance of reward -- in the hope that a biotech company would agree to complete the final testing and marketing, Evans says.
Copyright 2010 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
