Vice President Joe Biden, in describing the cancer research initiative President Obama asked him to lead, said “the goal of this initiative—this ‘moonshot’—is to seize this moment…to accelerate our efforts to progress toward a cure, and to unleash new discoveries and breakthroughs for other deadly diseases.”
As he noted during his recent visit to the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center to officially launch the initiative, however, he was “not naive about the likelihood of soon curing an entire group of diseases that have bedeviled humanity for centuries.” Rather, he said, the intention of the initiative is to accelerate progress already underway.
Biden personally lobbied for a major increase in cancer research funding in the government spending bill that Congress passed in December, pledging to pursue an initiative to end cancer for the rest of his term and beyond. The bill will raise funding for the NIH by $2 billion, including a $264 million boost specifically for the NCI, the biggest increase for the institute in more than a decade. Scientists concur with the VP’s lack of naiveté.
As Jose Baselga, M.D., Ph.D., the president of the American Association for Cancer Research and physician-in-chief and chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), told The New York Times, “Cancer is way more complex than anyone had imagined in 1970,” reflecting many scientists’ sentiments that this kind of approach won’t succeed quickly or easily.
Rebecca A. Burrell and colleagues, writing in the September 19, 2013, issue of Nature noted that the recently revealed genetic diversity both between and within tumors affecting key cancer pathways and driving phenotypic variation poses a significant challenge to personalized cancer medicine.
Among the researchers focused on tumor heterogeneity is MSKCC biologist Scott W. Lowe, Ph.D., chair of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program and the Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center, who commented in a MSKCC blog that “We are increasingly becoming aware of the problem of intra-tumor heterogeneity, the fact that one person’s tumor cells can vary depending on where in the body they are located. Even within the same tumor from the same patient, tumor cells might be subtly or even dramatically different. And there can be very important implications of this type of heterogeneity.”
If doctors are dealing with a highly heterogeneous cancer, the tiny fraction of cells in the biopsy may not be representative of the entire tumor mass, which means important disease features could be missed. What this means in practical terms, said Dr. Lowe, is that “A potentially effective therapy could be overlooked because the indicator for that drug, such as a specific gene mutation, wasn’t found in the biopsy. Conversely, the wrong drug might be chosen if a biopsy reveals the presence of an indicator that isn’t actually that prevalent in the tumor.”
For the full article that ran in GEN’s March 1 issue click here.
Patricia F. Fitzpatrick Dimond PhD, is Technical Editor of Clinical OMICs and President of BioInsight Communications.
