Newswise The Joint Center for Cancer Precision Medicine, a collaborative initiative among Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Womens Hospital, Boston Childrens Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has been established to create precision medicine treatment pathways for patients with advanced cancers and to speed the development of personalized therapies.

The Joint Center brings together expertise and resources in state-of-the-art capabilities including DNA sequencing and other tumor molecular profiling technologies, pathology, radiology, surgery, computational interpretation, and new tumor model systems; and reinforces the joint commitment to pursue advances in cancer genetics to improve patient care. It will be headquartered at Dana-Farber.

This center will allow us to be optimally positioned to answer the big questions in cancer genetics, especially as they affect clinical decision-making, said Levi Garraway, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Dana-Farber and the new centers director. We seek to understand which genetic and other molecular alterations predict how tumors will respond to targeted drugs, why some patients become resistant to drugs, and what that means about the treatments that should be tried next.

Our mission is to accelerate the development of personalized therapies that achieve long-term disease control and, eventually, the cure of many patients with advanced cancer, Garraway said. The terms precision and personalized both refer to an emerging form of cancer care that identifies genetic changes within a patients tumor that can be used to predict how it will behave and which drugs will be most effective against it.

The center is creating a new capability to use these huge resources in sequencing and pathology and making sure the data gets to caregivers to help customize treatment, said Edward Benz, Jr., MD, president of Dana-Farber.

This exciting collaboration will allow the life-giving breakthrough of advanced genetic analysis of cancer to be translated into clinical care, said Betsy Nabel, MD, president of Brigham and Womens Hospital (BWH). Patients will benefit from having the latest genetic discoveries applied to an individual treatment plan that will make a difference in their care.

This is an extraordinary moment in biomedicine, said Eric Lander, PhD, president and director of the Broad Institute. By learning from genomic information obtained in the course of clinical care of patients, this remarkable new center will be poised to make critical discoveries, and to ensure that those discoveries get translated back to the clinic.

A key part of the center will be a program to obtain and characterize new biopsies of patients tumors during their treatment. Scientists will study the DNA, RNA, and protein in the biopsy samples to understand better how cancers respond or become resistant to drugs. In addition, some of the specimens will be used to generate cancer cell lines in the laboratory.

This center will allow us to learn which genetic changes are driving each patients cancers, how the changes occur, and when in the course of each patient's cancer care these genetic changes exert their effects, said Neal Lindeman, MD, director of the Center for Advanced Molecular Diagnostics laboratory in the BWH Department of Pathology. All of this information can be used to design treatments that are more effective from the beginning and can be used to anticipate the changes each cancer will make during treatment, in the hopes of staying one step ahead of the disease over time.

The new center represents an exciting step forward on the path toward developing more treatments tailored to the particular characteristics of a childs cancer, said Katherine A. Janeway, MD, MMSc, a pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber/Boston Childrens Cancer and Blood Disorders Center (BCH). Pediatric cancers often differ substantially from adult cancers, and the new center advances our ability to understand the genetic profile of childhood malignancies and ultimately better serve our young patients.

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Joint Center for Cancer Precision Medicine Established