Daily Archives: January 31, 2015

The White House on Friday unveiled a $215 million program to study genes of a million Americans in various stages of sickness and health, with the hope of gaining vast new insight into diseases and how to cure them.

The Precision Medicine Initiative, which President Barack Obama announced in his State of the Union speech, will bring new funding to federal health and science agencies to build data that flows between medical clinics to labs that sequence the human genome and gather other data. The goal is to find more targeted personalized approaches to treatments and cures sometimes called personalized medicine.

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This helps us find new cures but also helps us create a genuine health care system as opposed to a disease care system. We want each of us to have sufficient information about our particular quirks so that we can make better life decisions, Obama said.

The initiative includes $200 million in new spending for the National Institutes of Health $70 million targeted for the National Cancer Institute and $10 million for the FDA. Another $5 million goes to the federal office in charge of health IT, which will work on making sure the data can be transmitted and shared by different clinical and research centers while protecting patient privacy. The people who allow their DNA to be studied will be volunteers.

Some key Republicans in Congress have signaled support of the precision initiative. House Energy and Commerce Chair Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who this week released draft legislation to reform FDA, said Obamas initiative is a natural fit in the discussion about how to accelerate and improve the discovery, development and delivery of new cures and treatments.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) attended the White House announcement and promised to work closely with Obama and Democrats so that cutting-edge medicine begins reaching patients more quickly, while still preserving this nations gold standard for safety and quality The president has recognized this, Chairman Upton in the House is working on this, and I have spoken with [HHS] Secretary [Sylvia Matthews] Burwell about our plans in the Senate health committee to work in a bipartisan way to modernize the way drugs and medical devices are discovered, developed and reviewed.

The development of the genetic consortium has long been a gleam in the eye of NIH director Francis Collins, who led the sequencing of the first human genome at a cost of about $400 million 15 years ago. Now it costs about $1,000 to sequence one persons genes.

Collins said that the lower costs of DNA sequencing and the availability of electronic health records lets scientists do things we couldnt have imagined a decade ago.

Thats one of the reasons were bold enough to say we can do this, he said of the new initiative.

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Obamas precision medicine initiative could bring ...

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Newswise (New York January 30, 2015) Two existing cancer drugs turn on a gene that tells tumor cells to remain inactive, according to a study led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published today in Nature Communications.

Researchers discovered that the gene NR2F1, when switched on, programs tumor cells to stay dormant. When the gene is switched off, tumor cells divide and multiply as part of abnormal growth, potentially allowing dormant cells to grow into tumors throughout the body (metastasis). Combining the anticancer drugs azacytidine and retinoic acid significantly increased the amount of active NR2F1 in tumor cells. These patterns were found in mouse models of several cancers, and confirmed in prostate cancer cells from human patients.

Results suggest that NR2F1 is a master regulator of tumor cell growth, influencing several genes that determine whether cells remain inactive, or quiescent in medical terms. According to the study, NR2F1 exerts control over long lasting programs in stem cells in the human embryo, where it directs cells to stop growing and become specialized cells (neurons) for life. This function suggests that NR2F1 may exert a long-lasting effect on tumor cells, keeping them dormant after they have broken off from an original tumor.

Our results explain why some tumor cells scattered through the body are committed to remaining harmless for years, while others cause active disease, said Julio A. Aguirre-Ghiso, PhD, Professor of Medicine, Hematology and Medical Oncology, and Otolaryngology at the Icahn School of Medicine. In finding this master switch we found a way to analyze tumor cells before treatment to determine the risk of a cancer recurrence or metastasis.

Azacytidine and retinoic acid, the latter a form of vitamin A, prevented tumor cells from rapidly multiplying, restored normal cell function, and activated several tumor suppressor genes that are often turned off in tumors, said study co-leader Maria Soledad Sosa, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Hematology at the Icahn School of Medicine. We now have strong evidence that combining these well-known drugs may have a profound, long-lasting therapeutic effect.

The current study builds on the research teams earlier finding that lowering amounts of tumor suppressor genes TGF2 and p38 awakened dormant tumor cells, fueling metastatic tumor growth. Azacytidine and retinoic acid restored TGF2 expression and p38 activation to drive tumor cell dormancy.

This study was supported by grants from the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation, National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, New York State Stem Cell Science program, JJR Foundation and Hirschl/Weill-Caulier Trust, Department of Defense and Janssen Research and Development LLC.

About the Mount Sinai Health System The Mount Sinai Health System is an integrated health system committed to providing distinguished care, conducting transformative research, and advancing biomedical education. Structured around seven member hospital campuses and a single medical school, the Health System has an extensive ambulatory network and a range of inpatient and outpatient servicesfrom community-based facilities to tertiary and quaternary care.

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Master Switch Found to Stop Tumor Cell Growth by Inducing Dormancy