A Medical Device Daily

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (Nashville, Tennessee) and the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR; Bethesda, Maryland) have established a new cancer research center that will be linked in with seven others around the world. The NFCR Center for Proteomics and Drug Actions , funded by a $1 million, five-year grant from NFCR, will be led by Larry Marnett, PhD, the Mary Geddes Stahlman Professor of Cancer Research and professor of biochemistry, chemistry and pharmacology at Vanderbilt. The center will be co-directed by Dan Liebler and Richard Caprioli, also of Vanderbilt.

“Our grant to the NFCR Center for Proteomics and Drug Actions brings together three of the top chemical scientists in proteomics research linking them in with other researchers around the world to work on the development of new anticancer drugs. It is this type of collaboration that will speed along the development of new cancer drugs and help save lives,” said Franklin Salisbury Jr., president of the NFCR.

With the completion of the Human Genome Project, proteomics research holds tremendous promise for cancer research, including the discovery of molecular markers for early diagnosis, identifying novel protein drug targets for new anticancer drug development, and revealing new endpoints for accelerating clinical trials, the NFCR said. Scientists at the new cancer research center will collaborate to develop new technology that will reveal how drugs interact with the protein targets.

Already, through earlier financial support from NFCR, Marnett has been able to successfully develop techniques that manipulate the structure of drug agents and make them bind to their targets more tightly, thus forming stable drug-target markers that make them easier to be detected and extracted, the NFCR said. The new grant allows Marnett to expand and take his research to a new level.

Cancer is a disease of 200 different types and subtypes, requiring extensive collaboration across a variety of scientific disciplines. As a result, NFCR has founded the NFCR Discovery Research Centers initiative of which this Center will join in conjunction with other NFCR Centers at the University of Oxford, Yale University, Case Western Reserve University, University of Alabama-Birmingham, Dana Farber Cancer Center, Translational Genomics Research Institute, and the Institute of Medicinal Biotechnology in Beijing. Through this initiative, NFCR has created a global consortium, promoting collaborations while providing cutting-edge technology platforms for top scientists to discover the root causes of cancer.

Since 1973 the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) has spent more than $230 million funding basic science cancer research and public education relating to the prevention, treatment and cure of cancer.

In other contracts news:

• The Coriell Institute for Medical Research (Camden, New Jersey) was recently awarded a $3.1 million contract from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to establish a sample repository for human genetic research.

The new repository will house samples for genetic research, including the samples collected for the International HapMap Project. The NHGRI initially worked with the Human Genetic Cell Repository at Coriell, which is sponsored by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), to establish, store and distribute the cell lines and DNA studied to develop the HapMap, a comprehensive description of the patterns of human genetic variation that has been placed in the public domain.

In the first phase of developing the HapMap, researchers mapped the common patterns of variation in the human genome, called “haplotypes,” using DNA from cell lines prepared from blood samples collected from 270 volunteers from four major world populations: people in Utah descended from individuals from Northern and Western Europe; the Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria; Han Chinese in Beijing; and Japanese in Tokyo. The cell lines from the Yoruba, Han Chinese and Japanese samples were prepared at Coriell. The samples from people with Northern and Western European ancestry had previously been prepared for the Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (Paris) and are part of the NIGMS Repository at Coriell.

The International HapMap Project produced a resource with 3.9 million single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs typed in each of the samples. A SNP is a place in the genetic code where different people have different letters of the genetic alphabet, and their patterns provide information about human variation that simplifies the process of finding genes that contribute to disease.

• Medical Staffing Solutions (MSSI; Vienna, Virginia) has been awarded a five-year contract for Physical Therapy Assistant services at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington state through the company’s wholly owned subsidiary, TeleScience International .

TeleScience provides medical administrative support services to Fairchild under a separate contract. The new contract award expands the scope of services the company provides to the base. TeleScience will provide Physical Therapy Assistant staffing services to the physical therapy department in the 92nd Medical Group at Fairchild Air Force Base. The award is for one base plus four option years.

In operation since 1992, MSSI-TeleScience International is a provider of long-term medical personnel and technology services to federal, state and local government agencies and to the private sector.