If cancer cells are like cars, then it makes sense to know who's at the wheel. That's the view behind a new effort to reveal the 'driver' mutations that trigger cancer and the 'passenger' mutations that enhance tumor growth rates, asserts John McPherson, director of cancer genomics at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, in Toronto.

Based at the Ontario Institute, the newly formed International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) was announced on 29 April. Its mission: to catalogue every genetic mutation in 50 different cancers. Each member nation—currently ten and counting—will tackle at least one disease type. “We'll be looking for 500 cases from each cancer for a total of 25,000 samples from the world,” McPherson says. “That makes it the largest coordinated effort to date to find the underlying causes of cancer.”

To date, perhaps only 50% of cancer mutations have been identified, suggests Brad Ozenberger of the National Human Genome Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland. But with new analytical tools, ICGC members hope to discover the rest within the next ten years, he says. “And with that, we'll be able to identify valuable new drug targets,” Ozenberger predicts. “But, [just] as important, we'll also be able to divide cancers by their genetic distinctions and use that information to design custom approaches for specific tumors.”

Indeed, tumors today are almost all classified by how they look under a microscope, explains Lincoln Stein, director of biocomputing at the Ontario Institute. “This project is going to force us to reorganize our tumor classification system according to affected cancer pathways,” says Stein, who will also serve as upcoming curator of the consortium's database. He expects the consortium database will formally launch in the fall, with results from research expected within 12 to 18 months.

The data will be freely available to the global research community, Ozenberger adds. “Technology advances have brought us to a threshold where we can begin looking at cancer comprehensively,” he emphasizes. “Now that we have that capability, we have to do this to improve people's health.”