HINXTON, UK--The Sanger Centre said it has secured £10 million from the Wellcome Trust to set up a Cancer Genome Project that will use data from the human genome project to identify gene abnormalities associated with all forms of human cancers. Michael Stratton and Richard Wooster of the Institute of Cancer Research will lead the project, to be based at Sanger. The two scientists are known for discovering the BRCA2 gene in 1995.
The project "will be one of the first examples of how the complete information emerging from the Human Genome Project can be used in understanding human disease," the center noted, adding that advances made through the cancer project would affect study of other human diseases such as heart disease and diabetes.
Project leaders said they would make use of the entire human sequence data generated by the Sanger Centre together with very high-throughput mutation detection techniques to adopt a global and systematic approach to identifying cancer genes.