British scheme to map cancer genome wins backing from US

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March 29, 2005
Times
By Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent



THE success of a small British project to map the genes that cause tumours has convinced the world’s largest funder of cancer research to begin a global hunt for the genetic roots of the disease.

The achievements of the £36 million Cancer Genome Project, at the Sanger Institute, near Cambridge, have so impressed an expert committee advising the United States National Cancer Institute (NCI) that it has recommended a similar scheme on a dramatically larger scale. The NCI, which commissioned the panel’s report, is expected to accept its proposal to invest $1.35 billion (£725 million) over nine years in tracing the DNA mutations that trigger the fifty most common forms of cancer.

Such a database would transform the search for new treatments for a disease that kills more than 155,000 people in Britain each year. The identification of the particular genes that malfunction to turn healthy cells cancerous will hand scientists thousands of potential targets for the development of new drugs.

The injection of such substantial US funds will also encourage other governments and charities to contribute to the scheme, creating a new version of the international Human Genome Project targeted specifically at cancer.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-1545525,00.html