Dartmouth-affiliated researchers have joined a new consortium to identify the genetic basis of the five most common types of cancer, including breast, prostate, lung, ovarian and colorectal cancer.
The project will involve hundreds of scientists from several different countries, including France, China and Australia, said Christopher Amos, community and family medicine professor and head of Dartmouth's Center for Genomic Medicine and the leader the Genetic Epidemiology of Lung Cancer Consortium.
The team of international researchers will use the OncoArray, a customized tool, to genotype 425,000 patient samples. Amos said the tool has the potential to make a significant impact in cancer research.
"The goal is to have enough people analyzed on the same array, to analyze different types of cancer," he said. "We're phenotyping them on a special array with 500,000 genetic markers on them."
He added that the goal of the research is to "crack the black box of biology" and learn how cancers form and grow.
The Center for Genomic Medicine is performing a significant amount of the research and will submit samples from 200,000 people, with half exhibiting some form of cancer and the other half acting as a control group.
The project is being funded through a series of federal and international government grants, including the U.S. National Cancer Institute, Genome Canada and Cancer Research UK.
Due to the ongoing shutdown of the federal government, however, funding for scientific research projects has been halted or frozen for all but critical programs.
The shutdown has the potential to delay the consortium's research.
"Right now the shipping of the samples isn't affected," he said. "Half of the research is funded in this year's budget and the other in last year's. If it goes on for a couple more weeks there will be delays."
Barring these delays, Amos predicts the research and its findings are on track for completion next year.
"The results will be completed sometime in early 2014," he said. "The final papers will be published in 2014. We're pretty far along in all of this."
Participating researchers said the use of the cancer analytic tool will provide new data for common, deadly cancers.
University of Southern California preventative medicine and neurology professor Brian Henderson said in a press release that this array will hopefully provide fresh evidence and indicators of the origin of these common cancers and aid in prevention and treatment.
"We hope this product will help us focus on the men who have the highest risk to the more fatal forms of this disease," he said.
Although the results have the potential to lead to breakthroughs in cancer research, Amos clarified that much of the work after data collection will involve sorting out how the various genetic markers correlate with cancer originators.
"We'll have large amounts of data," he said. "The problem will be figuring out what it means."
Amos said the process of sifting through the data will provide opportunities for students, including those with computer science, genomic research and cancer studies backgrounds, to contribute to the research.
"We're looking forward to lots of assistance from the Dartmouth community," he said.
