London

Wooster and Stratton: looking for mutations.

Britain's Wellcome Trust is to provide up to £10 million ($16.5 million) over the next five years to detect the genes that are mutated in human cancers and release the information to a public database.

The project, to be based at the Sanger Centre near Cambridge, will use sequence information from the international Human Genome Project — of which the trust is providing one third of the cost — as the basis for screening genomes for the mutations underlying oncogenesis.

The work is “one of the first ‘next step’, post-genome projects,” says Mike Dexter, director of the trust. “Although it will focus on cancer-related genes, it will also act as a ‘proof of concept’ for ideas that can be applied to most, if not all, polygenic diseases.”

The idea of screening cancer cell genomes for mutations was proposed by Mike Stratton and Richard Wooster of the Institute for Cancer Research (ICR) in Sutton. They led the team that located and then identified the BRCA2 breast-cancer susceptibility gene, based on a sequence from the Sanger Centre.

“The completion of the Human Genome Project will enable us to develop technology that we can use to compare theDNA sequence of normal and cancerous tissue from the same individual and hence identify the mutated genes implicated in tumour development,” says Stratton.

Providing substantial support for cancer research is a new move for the Wellcome Trust. But Dexter argues that the basic nature of the work, its direct link to the sequencing project, and its relevance to other polygenic diseases make it suitable for the trust's support. Additional funding (£1 million initially) is being provided from the ICR, and further funding is being sought.

Data will be made accessible to all researchers, in line with trust policy. “Initially we will be focusing on the common cancers, but ultimately the aim is to provide as much data as possible about the broad spectrum of human neoplastic disease,” says Stratton, who will head the project at the Sanger Centre.