The Veterans Administration (VA) www.va.gov is partnering with the Department of Defense (DOD) http://health.mil and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) www.cancer.gov to tailor cancer care for patients.
The tri-agency program will create the nation’s first system where cancer patients and their tumors are routinely screened for gene and proteins associated with their tumors to find targeted therapies for each individual patient. The process will continually generate new information to boost the clinicians’ ability to treat the disease.
The program called the “Applied Proteogenomics Organizational Learning and Outcomes” Consortium or APOLLO, is part of the wider national Cancer Moonshot initiative.
The new effort will center on proteogenomics which is a blend of genomics and proteomics recently demonstrated in NCI’s “Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium” referred to as CPTAC.
CPTAC’s proteogenomics approach was successful in demonstrating the scientific benefits of integrating proteomics with genomics to produce a more unified understanding of cancer biology and possibly therapeutic interventions for patients.
APOLLO will initially focus on lung cancer in patients at the VA and DOD medical centers with plans to eventually include other forms of cancer. APOLLO researchers and clinicians will classify veterans’ lung tumors based on changes in genes in the tumors and in the levels of proteins.
They will use the findings to recommend targeted therapies or refer patients to appropriate clinical trials. They will also partner with other sponsors of clinical trials testing targeted therapies.
“As researchers and clinicians learn more about which gene and protein signatures are associated with cancer, they may be able to do blood tests to screen-at-risk patients as soon as possible,” according to VA Under Secretary for Health David J. Shulkin.