BERKELEY, CA -- The National Cancer Institute (NCI) today announced awards totaling over $35.5 million to establish a network of teams that will investigate how to detect cancer by finding cancer-specific proteins and protein patterns in blood samples. The Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a leading member of the team based in the San Francisco Bay Area, in partnership with the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), and the Buck Institute for Age Research.
NCI, which is a part of the National Institutes of Health, calls the program Clinical Proteomic Assessment for Cancer (CPTAC). Leading the Bay Area team is UCSF's Susan J. Fisher, who is also a member of Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division. Joe W. Gray of Berkeley Lab and UCSF is a coprincipal investigator; Bradford W. Gibson of the Buck Institute is one of the team's major researchers; the University of British Columbia and the University of Texas's M. D. Anderson Cancer Center are also participating.
Principal investigator Fisher is a professor of cell and tissue biology at UCSF, Director of UCSF's Biomolecular Resource Center, a member of the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center, and a visiting staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division. Gray is Berkeley Lab's Associate Laboratory Director for Life and Environmental Sciences, Division Director of the Life Sciences Division, a professor of Laboratory Medicine at UCSF, and coleader of the breast oncology program at the Comprehensive Cancer Center. Gibson is a professor of chemistry and Director of the Chemistry Core at the Buck Institute.
Proteomics is the study of all the proteins in a cell, tissue, or organism, called its proteome, just as all of an organism's genes are called its genome. The goal of clinical proteomics for early detection of cancer is to identify certain proteins or patterns of proteins in bodily fluids, such as blood serum, which may signal cancer long befo
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Contact: Paul Preuss
paul_preuss@lbl.gov
510-486-6249
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
27-Sep-2006