Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital and the Broad Institute, all in Boston, have launched the Joint Center for Cancer Precision Medicine, headquartered at Dana-Farber. The focus of this clinical cancer genomics center will be on sharing the partners' huge resources in sequencing and new molecular profiling tools to help customize patients' treatment. The initiative will see the creation of a computational biology working group spread across the partner institutions including biologists, bioinformaticians and software designers to develop algorithms aimed at interpreting genome sequencing data. The Joint Center is focused on more than cancer sequencing, says Barrett Rollins, Dana-Farber's CSO. The pathology component is key to the project. Using sequencing, the Center will start with a well-characterized patient population, Rollins says, then follow disease progression and the effects of experimental drugs by watching how cancers respond or become resistant over time. The only way to do that, Rollins says, is to analyze tissue with advanced immunohistochemistry, sequencing, epigenetic analyses or proteomic profiling during treatment. “This is not part of routine clinical care. It's not even part of routine clinical research for the most part,” he says. The pathology techniques themselves aren't new, said Rollins, but the operational processes required to support multiple biopsies in a research capacity are. If this approach is successful, the center would “absolutely want to collaborate with as many groups as were interested.” Funding for the initiative is from local philanthropy.