$13
Million Grant For Integrative Cancer Biology Program
The National
Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences
Division over $2.5 million per year for the next five years
to establish and administer a multidivisional, multi-institutional
program in integrative cancer biology. The goal of the program
is to develop and test a computational model of signaling
networks involved in cancer, a model that can be used to identify
patients who will respond to treatments targeted at these
networks. The hope is that by identifying these small groups
before clinical trials begin, drugs that are effective with
some but not all patients will not be overlooked.
Joe W.
Gray, director of LSD, leads the effort in collaboration with
Frank McCormick of the University of California at San Francisco.
Other LSD investigators include Mary Helen Barcellos-Hoff,
Mina Bissell, and Paul Yaswen, who will be working with Bahram
Parvin in the Computational Research Division and Jian Jin
in the Engineering Division. The Berkeley Lab and UCSF researchers
are also collaborating with investigators at SRI International
and the Netherlands Cancer Institute, NKI.
NCI's
Integrative Cancer Biology Programs are intended to promote
the analysis of cancer as a complex biological system and
to embody this knowledge in computational systems that can
be used predictively, an objective the Berkeley Lab-led program
will meet with precision.
The direct
target of the modeling effort is a specific signaling pathway
known as Raf-MEK-ERK, one that is highly involved in some forms
of breast cancer. The tools developed to model and identify
this pathway will have wide application to other breast-cancer
signaling pathways.
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