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Summer Science Update
July 2007
The scientific highlight of the last few months was the third annual Canary Foundation Early Detection Symposium, where the growing Canary Foundation network came together at Stanford University for our largest and most successful symposium to date.
Throughout the spring of 2007, Canary Foundation was busy wrapping up the cell line Discovery Project as well as building a number of new programs. The Science Team met at Stanford University in May, where they crystallized plans for publishing our many experimental results and set priorities for the coming months for the Ovarian Cancer Program.
Canary Foundation's third annual Early Detection Symposium, also hosted at Stanford in May, was our largest and most successful to date, with 160 invited attendees (up from 90 last year). The speakers and audience included an impressive mix of leading academic researchers and clinicians, as well as commercial and foundational partners. The three-day symposium included many cutting-edge scientific presentations, a unique outdoors "poster session" in the redwoods, and two relaxed evening networking events. Despite our growing size, we were able to maintain an intimate, collaborative environment where new data and ideas were openly shared, and many left the meeting with renewed inspiration and new collaborations. The meeting also included an announcement of the recipients of the third set of research fellowships in early detection, cofunded by Canary Foundation and the American Cancer Society as part of the Canary Foundation and American Cancer Society Early Detection Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.
Dr. Patricia Carrigan with Dr. Simon Fredriksson
Canary Foundation/American Cancer Society Fellows with staff
The Panel Project team continues to work hard on the challenging task of developing custom tools for measuring novel biomarkers. A major highlight of the last few months has been the development of the first serum test for one of our candidate biomarkers, Pax8—an accomplishment that bodes well for the other assays that are under construction using the same approach. Our team is going to have their hands full over the coming months as our partnership with a local company that specializes in antibody development is beginning to yield the first batches of antibodies that our Victoria team is tasked with using to build new serum tests. The new equipment being purchased thanks to the Canary Derby will be critical in this assay development phase and will save time on one of the most crucial and difficult stages.
With the recent completion of the experimental phase of our first Discovery Project, which included in-depth molecular characterization of the DNA, RNA, and protein of 15 ovarian cancer cell lines, we are continuing our intensive, integrative data analysis on this remarkable data set. One use of these data is the identification of new candidate biomarkers, which we plan to do by using identifying genes that have characteristics similar to the best-known serum biomarkers across all of the diverse data types that we have collected. These data will also be extremely valuable in guiding our future direction, as we will be able to extract general rules about how serum levels of a protein are determined and thus identify the experiment types on which we should focus in future Discovery Projects.
A related Discovery subproject, the Ascites Project, which involves the analysis of cancer cells found in the fluid buildup of ovarian cancer patients (called ascites), has yielded its first data set. Our team used cutting-edge proteomic technologies to describe the proteins contained within and secreted by ascites-derived tumor cells. We have only just begun to analyze this new data, but it is already clear that these cells have many unique features and merit further study. Over the summer, we will undertake the same cost- and labor-intensive analysis on a second ascites sample. Together, this proteomic data will be useful for prioritizing biomarkers from our cell line Discovery Project because ascites samples are expected to be more similar than cell lines to primary ovarian cancer tumors.
Still more new data came from one of our collaboration projects, the Fallopian Project, which has now concluded its first phase. This project was designed to investigate the possibility that many cases of ovarian cancer are actually cases of Fallopian tube cancer that has spread to the ovaries by the time of detection. Canary Foundation funded an intensive blinded pathological review of Fallopian tubes from women at high risk for ovarian cancer who had their tubes removed as a prophylactic measure (prior to any symptoms) as well as Fallopian tubes from "controls" — women who had their tubes removed for reasons unrelated to ovarian cancer. While this first phase did show some early candidate lesions, the initial results are based on a relatively low number of controls and further research is needed. This phase serves as a guide to the next steps in identifying the earliest events in some types of ovarian cancer development.
Last but not least, the Imaging Project, led by Dr. Sam Gambhir at Stanford University, continues to work towards the development of tools for "seeing" small ovarian cancer tumors in living human beings using special molecular probes. The team is focusing on three lead candidates (targets) and has moved beyond the preliminary phases of testing these candidates "in vitro" using only cells. It is beginning to develop the types of sophisticated molecular probes that can be used to stick to and light up tumors in living beings. Once the challenging process of probe development is complete, we will test these probes in mouse models of ovarian cancer before moving on to human beings.
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