By Julia Karow
The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation and its sister organization, the Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium, said this week that a research initiative they are organizing has completed sequencing several multiple myeloma genomes and is currently analyzing the results.
The program, called the MMRC Multiple Myeloma Genomics Initiative, involves the Broad Institute and the Translational Genomics Research Institute and aims to comprehensively analyze the genomes of 250 multiple myeloma samples collected by the MMRC Tissue Bank.
MMRF said this spring that as part of the initiative, the Broad would sequence the genomes of at least 50 of these tumors.
Having completed the first few genome sequences, the scientists are now analyzing the data, which they plan to make available to other researchers within the next several months through a portal that is currently under construction. Additional genomes are being sequenced in parallel, according to MMRF and MMRC.
The initiative has also recently completed two other high-resolution genomic-profiling studies, performed by TGen, on the reference collection of 250 multiple myeloma tumor tissue samples.