May 3, 2006
Foundation Drives Research Agenda for Multiple Myeloma
When the National Cancer Institute announced its Cancer Genome Atlas project in December, the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation’s leaders already knew that their disease would be far down its list of priorities. After all, the relatively rare cancer accounts for only 1% of cancer diagnoses, with about 16,000 new cases each year.
So the Connecticut-based MMRF isn’t waiting for
the federal agencies. It is ahead of the curve, funding its
own $6 million, 3-year initiative to map the multiple
myeloma genome. The foundation is setting its own
agenda, having already created a consortium of 11 collaborating
institutions called the Multiple Myeloma Research
Consortium, including powerhouse research centers like
the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Mayo Clinic, and
the University of Chicago. They also created a tissue bank
with hundreds of bone marrow and matching peripheral
blood samples.
"We were fi nding we weren’t making progress as quickly
as we wanted to and that we really did need to take a more
proactive stance as opposed to just funding the best (grant
proposals) that we received," said Anne Quinn Young,
M.P.H., MMRF program director.
The foundation decided that it could serve best as a "catalyst," in the words of MMRF President Nancy Sumberaz, R.Ph.
It brought together possible competing interests and hammered
out details of intellectual property rights, publication priority,
and other issues that can hamper effective collaboration.
The resulting project is set up not as a grant but as a
contract between the research consortium, the Translational
Genomics Research Institute (TGen), and the Broad Institute
of MIT and Harvard. The group will study multiple
myeloma patients samples that they hope will help identify
new therapeutic targets and, in turn, drive patient selection
for clinical trials based on the molecular characteristics of
the patients’ disease. The data will be placed in the public
domain in real time, often even prepublication, and analyzed
data sets will be added to the raw data as work
is completed.
"It’s a completely new model," Sumbaraz said. "Any time
you have a new kind of way of doing business, you [can] get
a group of people who say ‘that can’t possibly ever work,’
which, for me, is a source of inspiration."
By Karyn Hede
© Oxford University Press 2006. DOI: 10.1093/jnci/djj197
