ICGC: Australia joins pancreatic project, Consortium prepares to disseminate first data
The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) is moving forward with its ambitious plan to sequence 500 samples of each of the 50 most common types of cancer. Australia announced in late March that it will commit $27 million to ICGC projects and in June the Consortium will make data available for several projects that are already up-and-running at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and the Sanger Institute in the U.K.
Nicola Roxon, Australia’s Minister of Health and Ageing, announced on March 26 that her government will invest $27 million (AUD, equivalent to $23 million CAD) in ICGC projects. Most of the funds will go toward a pancreatic cancer project. The announcement also includes funding for an ovarian cancer project at the Peter McCallum Institute in Melbourne, which will work with a group in Brisbane on genomics and molecular biology; research groups in Queensland and Sydney will contribute to the project as well.
“The Consortium is one of the most ambitious biomedical research efforts – and one of the most exciting international collaborations - since the Human Genome Project,” Roxon said in a speech to announce Australia’s funding for ICGC projects. “This will be exciting, groundbreaking research that promises to bring us significant steps further in understanding, preventing and treating cancer.”
The pancreatic project will take place in collaboration with researchers at OICR, who have already begun sequencing samples of pancreatic tumours. Both Canada and Australia will sequence 350 pancreatic cancer samples.
“Pancreatic cancer will affect one in 80 Ontarians in their lifetimes and it is one of the deadliest forms of cancer,” says Dr. John McPherson, Director, Cancer Genomics at OICR. “We look forward to having our Australian colleagues on board for the ICGC pancreatic cancer project. It is exciting to have grown the project into an international effort involving many hospitals and laboratories and two genome centres.”
Scientists from Ontario and Australia will meet to refine their approach to sample collection at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in Denver. Dr. Tom Hudson, President and Scientific Director of OICR, will co-chair a panel discussion with Dr. Gloria M. Petersen of the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine at the AACR meeting on April 21.
Meanwhile, data from the early stages of OICR’s pancreatic project, as well as data from the Sanger Institute’s breast cancer project, will be ready for dissemination in June. All members of the Consortium are committed to open access to their findings, and have agreed to make data available to the worldwide research community as it becomes available.
OICR houses the ICGC’s Data Coordination Centre. Bioinformaticians at OICR are currently building a database that will allow all of the ICGC’s member-institutes to publish their data online. Meanwhile, ICGC’s Consent and Data Access Policy working group has reported back to the Consortium’s Executive Committee on how to work out details related to consent, privacy and access to data. A policy for data access was approved in March.
ICGC is planning two meetings a year to bring together the international collaborators and move the Consortium forward. At each meeting, scientists will discuss their progress and the Consortium’s four working groups will report back with recommendations. In addition to Consent and Data Access, the ICGC has working groups in Tissue and Clinical Annotation, Technologies and Data Coordination and Management. The next ICGC meeting is planned for June in Hinxton, U.K., near Cambridge University.
