Scottsdale Healthcare Joins NIH Cancer Genome Atlas Project
The Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center at Scottsdale Healthcare is collaborating with The International Genomics Consortium (IGC) to serve as a critical network tissue source site to provide cancer tissue samples for analysis in the National Institutes of Health’s historic project The Cancer Genome Atlas project (TCGA).
The Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center will provide cancer tissue samples under uniform and standardized conditions and collect specific long-term clinical outcome data to facilitate research into the underlying cancer mechanisms.
IGC’s Expression Project for Oncology has combined its network and mission with TCGA to help create a comprehensive and coordinated effort to accelerate the understanding of the molecular basis of cancer through the application of genome analysis technologies, including large-scale genome sequencing.
The overarching goal of TCGA is to improve the ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent cancer. It is one of the largest initiatives to date to analyze such a wide array of cancers with so many different genomic analyses ranging from sequencing to methylation studies.
The genomic blueprints of each cancer will be available on the web for all scientists to have access to for translational discoveries. TCGA plans to analyze 500 tumors from each cancer type studied by the program and will provide the clinically annotated outcome data along with the complete genomic analysis on the web free of any intellectual property restrictions.
IGC plans to retain a portion of each sample that it provides to TCGA, if available, to expedite translational discoveries to help patient care, in work separate from TCGA. Additional information on TCGA may be found at http://cancergenome.nih.gov/.
Scottsdale Healthcare has been a keystone partner of IGC since IGC’s formation and has been critical to IGC’s success in accelerating genomic discoveries to patient care.
“We look forward to supporting The Cancer Genome Atlas project and other initiatives at IGC through the Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center and Scottsdale Healthcare Research Institute. This is the latest in a series of collaborative projects between Scottsdale Healthcare and IGC, another example of our commitment to advances in personalized medicine and treating the most challenging cancers,” said Mark Slater, Ph.D., Vice President, Research, Scottsdale Healthcare.