Leukemia researchers with Toronto connection find ‘needle in a haystack’
June 5, 2011
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Theresa Boyle
HEALTH REPORTER
The world’s largest cancer research initiative, which is being led out of Toronto, has made its first major discovery.
Researchers have found four genetic mutations behind the most common type of leukemia affecting Canadian adults, findings that could eventually help in diagnosing and treating the disease.
The discovery was made by researchers in Spain, but may not have happened and certainly would not have happened as quickly without the help of the International Cancer Genome Consortium, headquartered in the MaRS building on College St., said Dr. Tom Hudson, co-founder of the organization and president of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.
“We definitely sped it up,” he exclaimed.
The consortium is composed of researchers from 13 countries who are sharing information and working collaboratively to map 25,000 cancer genomes. Researchers essentially feed raw data into the consortium’s informatics system, which identifies cancer genes and mutations. The system is on its way to becoming what is predicted to be the largest health informatics database in the world.
The information is not patented, so it is quickly and freely made available to researchers everywhere to hasten cancer research.
“By making this data available to the world’s researchers, the consortium members hope treatments that target the mutations driving different types of cancer will be developed more quickly,” Hudson said.
“The discovery published (Sunday) provides a diagnostic and therapeutic target for a disease that is not currently curable. We are moving rapidly into the era of personalized medicine, where treatment will be based on a combination of pathology and mutation profiles, resulting in better clinical responses and increased survival,” he added.
The Spanish researchers studied the genes of more than 300 patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and found thousands of mutations. They further identified four of these genetic mutations as “drivers” that case cancer cells to multiply.
“Finding the drivers is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Hudson said.
Three years into a 10-year mandate, the consortium has so far gathered data on 3,000 of 25,000 cancer genomes, with research on the four leukemia genetic mutations being the most advanced.
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