The Human Genome Project sets out to identify all the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA. The knowledge gained from this colossal effort serves as a source of vital information in cancer research.
Gary Gilliland, MD, PhD
Professor of Medicine
Harvard Medical School
Related Link: www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome
It's very exciting for us to try to identify the causes of cancers. We're focusing mainly on the most difficult leukemias like acute myelogenous leukemias or AML's. These are life threatening diseases, they're treated with intensive chemotherapies but only about 20% of adults who develop this disease will survive for five years. And we're taking the observations in CML and extending them into AML by going through the human genome and sequencing the DNA from leukemic cells from these patients. This wouldn't be possible were it not for the human genome mapping project, we've benefited dramatically from that, and we've already identified several genes from that that we think contribute to the development of AML and we've identified compounds that we hope will be the next Gleevec that will be used to treat AMLs. Dr. Stone is testing several of these in clinical trials now, they're called FLT-3 inhibitors and we're very hopeful that they'll have some activity or improve the outcomes for patients that have AML. And we and others are interested in trying to extend these observations into breast cancer, prostate cancer, investigators are looking at colon cancer for exactly these same types of mutations that cause the cancer so that we can then design drugs that will turn those genes back off.