Clinical OMICs - Issue 5 - (Page 7)

Memorial Sloan Kettering Receives $100M Gift toward Precision Oncology Center Business Wire W Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's physician-in-chief José Baselga, M.D. (left), with Marie-Josée Kravis, chair of the board of the Sloan Kettering Institute (center) and Henry R. Kravis, investor and philanthropist (right). ith a little help from Sloan Kettering Institute chair Marie-Josée Kravis and her husband, philanthropist Henry R. Kravis, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) is launching a new program that it says will reshape clinical trials and speed up translation of molecular discoveries into routine clinical practice. Dubbed the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology (CMO), the new center will support development of individualized cancer therapies and diagnostics. The couple donated $100 million toward its founding. The CMO, according to MSK, will include around 20 labs and support over 100 MSK faculty and staff. It will also contain two next-generation sequencing (NGS) facilities, one of which will sequence patient samples in real time, while the other focuses on discovering new genetic alterations and therapeutic targets. MSK says new lab space is currently under construction, and it is buying new (continued on p. 24) Warring with Cancer Avatars to Expose Unique Vulnerabilities of Real Tumors www.clinicalomics.com kind of Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation. At first, the virtual cell has the internal workings of a normal, healthy cell. Then, the virtual healthy cell can be made cancerous. Indeed, it can be turned into any kind of cancer cell by distorting specific points and pathways in the system. These cellular distortions represent a person's cancer avatar. Once the avatar is generated, a computer model predicts which drugs, based upon their known functions, are most likely to kill a real cancer cell. This approach to tumor modeling has been developed by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center. They generated cancer avatars for cells obtained from patients with glioblastoma, a highly aggressive © Juan Gärtner-Fotolia.com C ancer avatars, much like avatars in video and computer games, may become dynamic characters, not just collections of visual features. If cancer avatars are developed on the basis of genomic profiles, they can reflect the signaling and metabolic complexities of real cancers. What's more, a cancer avatar, set loose in a virtual world- call it TumorSpace-may interact with different adversaries-drugs, say-and experience different fates. A crushing defeat would be cause for celebration, for playing with a cancer avatar is more than a game. It could reveal which drugs would be most effective in helping real patients. Researchers fully aware of how computer simulations may inform personalized medicine have developed a virtual cell that achieves a Once an avatar is generated, a computer model predicts which drugs, based upon their known functions, are most likely to kill a real cancer cell. cancer of the brain's glial cells. After generating predictions of which drugs would be most effective, the researchers "truth checked" their predictions against standard, cultured cells in drug-sensitivity experiments. The researchers published their work May 21 in the Journal of Translational Medicine, in an article entitled "In silico modeling predicts drug (continued on p. 27) June 12, 2014 Clinical OMICs 7 http://www.clinicalomics.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clinical OMICs - Issue 5

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Clinical OMICs - Issue 5