© 2001 by Oxford University Press
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 93, No. 16, 1203,
August 15, 2001
© 2001 Oxford University Press
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Clinical Proteomics Program Announced
The National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently announced a 3-year, $3.3 million program to begin testing blood and tissue biopsies from cancer patients in search of subtle protein changes associated with the disease. This program could help scientists diagnose cancer more accurately and help them tell patients whether a drug will be toxic or effective in treating their cancer.The new program also marks one of the first—if not the first—use of proteomic technologies in clinical research. Proteomics, or the study of all proteins in living cells, has become a hot area of medical research as scientists develop laboratory tools capable of rapidly scanning cells for hundreds of proteins at once. Until now, most proteomic studies have been geared toward learning how to apply these new tools for research.
Begun in 1997, the initiative is led by Lance Liotta, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the Laboratory of Pathology in NCI’s Center for Cancer Research, and Emanuel Petricoin, Ph.D., of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
As Petricoin noted, the collaboration has been "extraordinarily productive" to date, as he and his colleagues already have invented or refined several key technologies used in proteomic analysis. Included among their accomplishments is the development of protein microarrays—which measure the cellular levels of hundreds of proteins at once—and a new artificial-intelligence tool to find protein patterns, or fingerprints, indicative of emerging cancer or drug toxicity.
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