The "Moon Shots Program" will focus on genomics to understand the genetic and molecular basis of cancers and to identify patient-specific treatments by making genomics routine in cancer care. Tumor analysis coupled with clinical trial literature search to try and match therapies to patient-specific biomarker information to generate a treatment approach. The problem is that genomics cannot predict for disease or patient-specific drug effects (drug selection).

No technology is more well suited to the investigation and simultaneous analysis of the relationships between patient-specific target molecules, cell functions and cell sub-populations than cytometry and Cytometric analysis of cell phenotype and function provides a very comprehensive overview of this ever-broadening field. It doesn't dismiss DNA testing, it uses all the information, measuring the interaction of the entire genome, to design the best treatment for each individual.

Replacing the one-size-fits-all paradigm with another one-size-fits-all paradigm isn't making personalized cancer therapy any more cost effective. Targeted therapy is still a one-size-fits-all model. Finding what targeted therapies would work for what cancers is very difficult. A lot of trial-and-error goes along trying to find out. I don't think it is much about companies blockading cures as it is they just "don't know how" to go about doing it.

What Georgetown does with "their" new breakthrough is to establish a cell-line (immortalizes it). They may or may not have a better way of establishing cell-lines. Problem is, cells-lines don't recapitulate drug response patterns which exist in the body. For drug selection, it is better to directly remove tumor microclusters straight from the body and immediately test them, before they change.

A cell-line is a product of immortal cells that are used for biological research. Cell-lines can perpetuate division indefinitely. Regular cells can only divide approximately 50 times. Cell-lines are useful for experimentation in labs as they are always available to researchers as a product and do not require harvesting (acquiring of tissue from a host) every time cells are needed in the lab. They can clone cells from a cell-line (HeLa cells).

NCI had a huge lab working on microarrays to look for patterns of mRNA and protein expression which are predictive of chemotherapy response. They spent 2 years trying to find patterns which correlated using the NCI's various established ovarian cell-lines. They thought they had something, but when they started to apply them to fresh tumor specimens, none of the results in the cell-lines was applicable to the fresh tumors. Everything they'd worked out in the cell-lines was not worth anything and they had to start over from square one.

This may be something similar to what researchers at Johns Hopkins and Washington University at St. Louis had found out. Our body is 3D (three-dimensional), not 2D (two-dimensional) in form. They, and other researchers, have pointed to the limitations of 2D "cell-line" study and chemotherapy to more correctly reflect the human body. Traditionally, in-vitro (in lab) cell-lines have been studied in 2D, which had inherent limitations in applicability to real life 3D in-vivo (in body) states. This should really help out research in looking for and developing new therapeutics. But when it comes to actually using those therapeutics, you need fresh "live" cells, not passaged cell-lines.

Just as a cancer genome refers to the complete set of genes, the metabolome refers to the complete set of metabolites in a given tumor. You may need to have the metabolome as well as the genome.

There are many reasons why cancer cures remain out of reach, but several changes could be implemented immediately to increase our rate of success. One of them is the need to redouble our efforts in the study of basic metabolism and the growing field of metabolomics (the metabolome).

Oncologist Robert A. Nagourney, MD, PhD, responded to news from Georgetown University about the use of cancer cell testing in a laboratory environment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FhpaZwCRTE&feature=related 

In an apparent effort to play King Solomon, the University of Texas System vice chancellor for health affairs has granted a limited waiver from the institution’s conflict-of-interest policy to the president of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, The Houston Chronicle reports.

And the move is prompting criticism because because the cancer center president Ronald DePinho will be allowed to maintain financial ties with his three drugmakers. His holdings in Aveo Pharmaceuticals, Karyopharm and Metamark Genetics will be placed in a blind trust as part of the waiver, the paper writes.

This is clearly an interesting and unusual situation. The vice chancellor appears to be suggesting that real-world experience is useful to the school and apparently does not want to make a move that might prompte DePinho to exit. On the other hand, the critics make a point that a partial waiver suggests a slippery slope.

Source: Pharmalot

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/UT-System-lets-MD-Anderson-president-keep-3976008.php