VATIS UPDATE Article

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the United States, is part of a nationwide effort to learn more about the role of proteins in cancer biology and to use that information to benefit cancer patients. PNNL has paired with physicians and scientists at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), the United States, in one of three projects by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the United States, to bring detailed data about proteins to the bedsides of participants in current clinical trials.

The OHSU-PNNL team is studying acute myeloid leukemia, the most common type of acute leukemia in adults. Other teams nationwide are focusing on breast and ovarian cancer. The study at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute is sponsored by NCI and will include up to 200 participants. Physicians will look at the safety and effectiveness of several FDA-approved drugs that inhibit cell signaling that occurs in patients with acute myeloid leukemia. The study is led by Brian J. Druker, with funding from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

For the current study, scientists will analyze blood samples from the study participants, looking at specific levels of proteins. The hope is to identify proteins that indicate which patients respond well to specific treatments and which patients don’t respond to treatment, an important step to personalize therapies for patients. Last year, scientists took at in-depth look at the proteins in the tumors of 169 ovarian cancer patients, marking one of the biggest studies in proteogenomics.