Moffitt and Clinomics in cancer collaboration
Moffitt Cancer Centre with a primary objective to jointly develop
new technologies for use in cancer research.
The collaboration is intended to make use of Clinomics' emerging new technology based on tissue microArrays (TMAs) and its extensive database of highly characterised human and biology samples. The joint research will be conducted in the laboratories of the Moffitt Cancer Centre.
Mike Kerins, chief executive of Cytomyx of which Clinomics are a subsidiary, told DrugResearcher.com about the collaboration: "The vision was to combine the strengths of the two institutions to develop new knowledge, to drive the development of more accurate processes to identify, categorise and treat cancers of all types."
"Moffitt was selected because it uses gene expression profiles to revolutionise the way that we define cancers - in a way that will lend itself to the development of rational cancer treatments."
Clinomics' TMA technology allows the identification of gene and protein expression patterns in tumours on a high-throughput basis. This data will be used to generate 'molecular signatures' for more precisely defining cancer patient subgroups, which in turn will lead to improved cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Kerins explained that using gene and protein expression patterns to generate molecular signatures would result in major improvements in cancer R&D.
"Cancer is still diagnosed today by microscopic examination of the tissue or cancerous cells. While it has served us well as a method, it has been the mainstay for 100 years, and suffers from the drawback of only looking at the appearance of cells, and not the underlying molecular events that drove the cell to become a cancer cell."
"Only recently has the technology been developed to define the specific genes that are expressed in a specific tumour cell. This gives a signature on that tumour at the molecular level, providing data that is more empirical, more directly related to the underlying cause of the tumour, which is a molecular disease."
"What is needed is to generate these 'signatures' on statistically significant numbers of tumours, combined with all the current diagnostic methodology."
Kerins explained the initial phase of the research program would specifically focus on colon and breast cancer, setting up the systems to analyse hundreds of samples, and analyse the data, with the goal of improving treatment outcomes.
Pharmaceutical industry researchers can use TMA technology to link the presence of a particular protein to the progression of a disease. Another major application for the technology is in the development of therapeutic antibody products which can be used to demonstrate these antibodies are found only to bind to the directed protein.
Timothy Yeatman, associate centre director at the Moffitt Cancer Centre commented: "Molecular signatures may be able to identify and predict the future biological behaviour of different tissues or tumour types."
Kerins added: "The major advantage of the signatures will be more empirical, reproducible cancer diagnosis. Also, the data, being right at the level of molecular events that define a cell as a tumour cell, will provide a more empirical basis for a revolution in cancer therapeutics."
The emergence of TMAs has enabled the study of hundreds of individual tissue samples in parallel to establish the relative levels of protein expression allowing the simultaneous analysis of protein expression in up to 1000 tissue samples in a single experiment improving cost-efficiency.
TMAs consist of up to 1000 tiny cylindrical tissue samples (usually 0.6mm in diameter) that are assembled in a paraffin block from which sections (thin slices) are then cut and attached to glass microscope slides.
"Tissue microarrays solve the throughput problem. Instead of analysing single samples in a linear fashion, massively parallel analysis is achieved, with data on thousands of tumours generated and analysed, simultaneously."
TMA use is growing rapidly among histology labs and recent reports indicate numbers of users has at least doubled each year over the past two years. The market for TMAs is expected to grow at more than 40 per cent per year to reach over $150 million (€121 million) by 2008.
