Federal Research Initiative Set To Launch

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have announced a new joint research and clinical program to develop better and more targeted treatments for cancer.

The new collaboration, called the Clinical Proteomics Program, melds the study of all proteins in living cells (or proteomics) to the clinical care of patients-the first time this technology has been applied directly to patient care.

"This new approach to treatment holds the potential to revolutionize cancer detection and care," said Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson in announcing the collaboration. Emanuel Petricoin, Ph.D. of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), and Lance Liotta, M.D. of NCI's Center for Cancer Research, are heading the effort.

The new Clinical Proteomics Program will employ lab techniques that can rapidly scan cells for hundreds of proteins at once. Petricoin and Liotta have also created new technologies to generate "protein fingerprints" that may provide early warnings of drug side effects.

"The great challenge now in proteomics research is to begin to apply these technologies to clinical care," said Petricoin. "We hope to take these techniques out of the lab to assess their benefit for people with cancer, in a true bench-to-bedside clinical research program."

The research will eventually lead to individualized therapies for cancer patients, and even enable researchers to determine toxic side effects in the lab before giving treatments to actual patients.

Petricoin and Liotta have already identified more than 130 proteins in cancers of the breast, ovary, prostate, and esophagus that change when the cells in these tissues grow abnormally, which may provide new means of diagnosing and treating cancers earlier.

They will now be analyzing the patterns of proteins in extracted tumor cells before and after a patient has been treated to determine how cancerous proteins are affected by different treatments at the cellular level.

SOURCES:
The Food and Drug Administration (http://www.fda.gov)
The National Cancer Institute (http://www.nci.nih.gov)

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