NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Cancer Institute has named a consortium of researchers at centers around the country that will focus on identifying proteins that come from alterations in cancer genomes and make its findings publicly available for use by other scientists.
The Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) program will add to NCI's ongoing initiatives in molecular cancer and genomics, such as The Cancer Genome Atlas, by seeking to define proteins translated from cancer genomes so that they may enable researchers to link genotype to proteotype and phenotype.
The consortium includes a network of proteome characterization center teams, a data center, and a resource center.
Today, NCI said the new CPTAC centers include a Cancer Proteomic Center at Washington University, St. Louis, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Boise State University; a Center for Application of Advanced Clinical Proteomic Technologies for Cancer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; a center for Proteo-Genomic Discovery and Prioritization and Verification of Cancer Biomarkers at The Broad Institute and at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; and two Proteome Characterization Centers, one at Johns Hopkins University and one at Vanderbilt University.
The CPTAC network will pursue four central objectives: identifying and characterizing the proteins from tumor and normal tissue specimens; integrating genomic and proteomic data from analysis of common cancer biospecimens; development of assays for proteins that may be potential biomarkers; and performing testing of verification assays in relevant cohorts of biospecimens.
The network will aim to integrate genomics and proteomics efforts to detect and quantify protein products that correspond to splice variants, mutations, insertions, deletions, rearrangements, copy number aberrations, or epigenomic changes.
The researchers also will use a "mapping proteome to genome" approach to generate an inventory of the detectable proteins in a tumor.