Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Gerstner Family Foundation Commits $10 Million to Overcome Cancer Drug Resistance
The Gerstner Family Foundation gift will support a two-pronged approach to the problem of cancer drug resistance: one based in the laboratory and the other in partnership with clinical researchers.
First, researchers at Broad Institute will systematically and comprehensively identify the mechanism of drug resistance, using CRISPR genome-editing technology. This revolutionary tool was developed in part at the Broad Institute and allows researchers to use experimental models to rapidly test which genes are responsible for cancer drug resistance in a lab setting.
Second, Broad Institute is partnering with two of the world's leading cancer centers: Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in Boston and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York to launch the largest study to date of pre-treatment and drug-resistant tumors. By comparing the genome sequence of pre-treatment tumors to resistant tumors, researchers hope to identify the mutations that cause resistance....