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2021 - Updates & Insights Blog

  • Diagram of an expanded "universe" of cancer targets with tumor intrinsic and extrinsic, and emerging targets represented.
    • By Roya Rafiee, M.Sc., Ph.D.

    Identifying new targets and therapies for cancers will require thinking beyond the proverbial oncogene. Researchers from NCI’s Cancer Target Discovery and Development (CTD2) Network discuss new ways to model cancer and its potential vulnerabilities.

  • Image of cell growth assays performed on knockout cancer cell lines.
    • By Peggy I. Wang

    Identifying the “targets” for targeted therapy is a major challenge in precision medicine research. Dr. Jason Sheltzer discusses how he inadvertently uncovered mischaracterized cancer targets and what his findings may mean for cancer drug development.

  • Photo of Uganda Cancer Institute in Kampala, Uganda
    • By Nick Griner, Ph.D. and Peggy I. Wang, Ph.D.

    The molecular mechanisms by which HPV infection leads to cancer, especially in low- and middle-income countries experiencing high incidence and mortality rates, have yet to be clearly delineated. A recent genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic study of cervical tumors from Ugandan patients looks at specific types of HPV and the genomic alterations they cause.

  • Screenshot of the number of users per month at NCI’s Genomic Data Commons surpassed 73,000 in January 2021
    • By Louis M. Staudt, M.D., Ph.D.

    A short time ago the Genomic Data Commons (GDC) was just a dream. CCG Director Lou Staudt describes what the GDC team has built so far: an interactive data system with genomic data processing pipelines for all types of researchers to use.

  • Master switch transcription factor signaling pathways drive cellular proliferation and are important therapeutic targets.
    • By Eugene F. Douglass Jr., Ph.D., Bence Szalai, Ph.D., Robert J. Allaway, Ph.D., and Andrea Califano, Ph.D.

    To better understand the off-target programs of cancer therapies, CTD² researchers created PANACEA, a gene expression database in response to 400 FDA-approved or late stage clinical cancer drugs, and hosted a community challenge to identify drug off-targets.

  • NCI's Human Cancer Models Initiative
    • By Eva Tonsing-Carter, Ph.D. and Cindy Kyi, Ph.D.

    New features of HCMI's Searchable Catalog allows users to easily locate models of interest and their associated data at the Genomic Data Commons. HCMI is generating next-generation cancer models with quality-controlled clinical, biospecimen and molecular characterization data for the research community.

  • NCI's Cancer Target Discovery and Development (C-T-D-Squared) Program
    • By Kenneth Smith, Ph.D., Vlado Dancik, Ph.D., Zhou Ji, Ph.D., Aristidis Floratos, Ph.D., and Paul Clemons, Ph.D.

    Recent updates to the CTD² Dashboard include changes to the presentation, annotation of experimental methods, search function, and addition of new links to external data resources and web applications. The CTD² Dashboard aims to make functional data and results from the CTD² Network easily accessible.

  • NCI's Next generation technology for next generation cancer models program
    • By Cindy Kyi, Ph.D. and Eva Tonsing-Carter, Ph.D

    NCI's Next-Generation Technologies for Next-generation Cancer Models program supports the development of technologies and tools that will facilitate, accelerate, and enhance research using human-derived, next-generation cancer models such as organoids and conditionally reprogrammed cells.

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