$691,930 awarded for in silico center of excellence

SAIC-Frederick, under its prime contract with the National Cancer Institute, has named the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) as one of five national centers selected to conduct cancer experiments using supercomputer simulations.

The award of the "In Silico Research Centers of Excellence" contract partners TGen with 5AM Solutions, a Virginia-based life science software development firm. The award of $691,930 for the first 12-months includes two 12-month option periods that if executed amount to an additional $1,373,582 for a total of $2,065,512 over three years.

The Center of Excellence will use computer tools developed as part of the NCI Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG), which is a data-sharing network for researchers, physicians and patients. The caBIG program is designed to accelerate methods for detecting, diagnosing, treating and preventing cancer.

"At TGen, we will use this unique opportunity to focus with our collaborators on new ways to quickly and more effectively treat patients with brain cancer,'' said John Pearson, the project's Principal Investigator and Head of TGen's Bioinformatics Research Lab.

William FitzHugh, Chief Science Officer for 5AM Solutions, will handle the Center's operational direction.

"We're thrilled to be given the opportunity to apply powerful computational techniques to analyze the data available on the caBIG network," said FitzHugh. "In combination with significant new data developed by TGen, we will use informatics to further the goal of personalized medicine, creating specific treatments for individual patients."

TGen researchers will use in silico research in a program called "Test to Best.'' It will use comprehensive genomic data involving 40 brain tumor models and 20 proven types of targeted therapies to create treatment programs for brain-tumor patients.

"This will be a very unique data set, representing the largest collection of patient brain tumor models and the widest variety of therapies applied in a controlled setting,'' said Dr. Michael Berens, Head of TGen's Brain Tumor Research Lab.

"Now that you have this data, how can you best exploit it for the next patient who walks into the neuro-oncologist's office?'' Berens said. The answer should be revealed through analytical tools developed by the TGen and 5AM Solutions team through the in silico research project, he said. "We hope to create a process where a patient's tumor would align with one of these models, and we would know which of the 20 treatments was the best one against that tumor. It's a path to evidence-based personalized therapy.''

The tumor models and therapies have been developed through the Ivy Genomics Based Medicine (Ivy GBM) Project; a program directed by Dr. Berens at TGen and funded through a $3 million grant from the California-based Ben and Catherine Ivy Foundation.

The Ivy GBM Project is a nine-institution consortium, led by TGen, working to categorize tumors by molecular profiling and to test each tumor against a wide spectrum of treatments to match differences in response with the profiles.

"We see data sharing among researchers and medical institutions as an essential part of the Ivy GBM Project, as well as a vital component to moving the field of patient-focused research forward," said Catherine Ivy, founder of the Ben and Catherine Ivy Foundation.

According to the NCI, the Centers of Excellence also are envisioned as ways to promote investigator-initiated in silico research projects, leveraging caBIG tools and data along with a broad range of other tools and data available to the bioinformatics, medical informatics and cancer research communities: "The primary goal of the ISRCE (In Silico Research Centers of Excellence) will be to add scientific value to the large-scale datasets developed as part of the caBIG program, and currently accessible through the caGrid."

Besides TGen, the other four centers are at Columbia University, Emory University, Georgetown University and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.