A significant breakthrough in the fight against cancer
We all know the old adage, “Knowing is half the battle.” This could not be more true when it comes to the battle against cancer. GE researchers, in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company, Lilly, have had a significant research breakthrough that will vastly increase our knowledge and understanding of cancer.
Cancer diagnosis and treatments have come a long way in the last decade, in large part, because we know so much more about cancer itself. One of the reasons for this increased knowledge base is our ability to analyze cells, proteins and gene expression with a multitude of innovative and increasingly accessible technologies. We are starting to see and understand how cancer cells behave because we are learning more about the proteins and genes that comprise those cells. The study of specific proteins or genetic qualities in cancer is not new. It has been occurring for quite some time now, and many significant discoveries have been made. The discovery of the link between HER-2 overexpression and responsiveness to Herceptin (trastuzumab) illustrated the promise of personalized medicine and how drug treatments could be tailored in the future to more effectively treat cancer based a person’s genetic makeup.
One limitation of research into identifying biomarkers associated with disease characterization and drug responsiveness, is that typically only one target at a time is measured in a single tissue sample. At the other extreme, gene array approaches allow investigation of up to thousands of genes, but this requires destruction of the tissue. Because of this, the biomarker results cannot be analyzed in the context of the structure and function of the tumor, and we lose information on their original location and their neighboring biomarkers. It is this network of information that we believe may unlock the underlying mechanisms of cancer development and progression.
For the past two years, I have been a part of team here at Global Research working with Lilly to develop the advanced molecular classification tools that will enable us to analyze and interpret and visualize biomarkers in tumors and other tissues in a completely new way. Well, we made our first breakthrough by measuring 25 biomarkers in a single tissue sample, and developing new computational and visualization approaches to map this data back to their original cells, and visualizing the patterns of biomarker expression across the sample. This essentially uncovers signatures or expressions of cancer that have previously been hidden from view. If these maps can help us understand disease mechanism or response to therapy it could completely change how we understand cancer onset and progression and potentially diagnosis.
The advanced tools that GE is developing with Lilly could reveal more about cancer than we ever knew before. As we go forward in our ongoing research efforts, we are very excited about the discoveries that lie ahead and implications for drug discovery and diagnostics.
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