Breaking the Bottleneck in Interpreting Cancer Genomes.

Researchers from the UC San Diego School of Medicine and University of California, San Francisco – with support from a diverse team of collaborators including SDSC – launched an ambitious new project to determine how all of the components of a cancer cell interact. “We’re going to draw the complete wiring diagram of a cancer cell,” said Nevan Krogan, director of the UC San Francisco division of QB3, a quantitative biosciences research institute, in announcing the Cancer Cell Map Initiative, or CCMI. Krogan is an investigator at Gladstone Institutes and co-director of CCMI with Trey Ideker, chief of medical genetics in the UC San Diego Department of Medicine and founder of the UC San Diego Center for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics. The CCMI will provide key infrastructure for the recently announced alliance between UC San Diego Health Sciences and San Diego-based Human Longevity Inc., which plans to generate thousands of tumor genomes from UC San Diego cancer patients. It also will leverage resources and information from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), including large databases of cancer genomes and pathways that are being developed in collaboration with SDSC and UC Santa Cruz. SDSC currently hosts the UC Santa Cruz Cancer Genomics Hub (CGHub), a secure repository for storing, cataloging, and accessing cancer genome sequences, alignments, and mutation information from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) consortium and related projects.