Precision medicine center established

The Joint Center for Cancer Precision Medicine has been established to create precision medicine treatment pathways for patients with advanced cancers and to speed the development of personalized therapies.

The center — a collaboration between Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard — is designed to bring together personnel and resources related to DNA sequencing and other tumor molecular profiling technologies, pathology, radiology, surgery, computational interpretation, and new tumor model systems.

The center will be headquartered at Dana-Farber.

“This center will allow us to be optimally positioned to answer the big questions in cancer genetics, especially as they affect clinical decision-making,” Levi Garraway, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Dana-Farber and the new center’s director, said in a press release. “We seek to understand which genetic and other molecular alterations predict how tumors will respond to targeted drugs, why some patients become resistant to drugs, and what that means about the treatments that should be tried next. Our mission is to accelerate the development of personalized therapies that achieve long-term disease control and, eventually, the cure of many patients with advanced cancer.”

A key part of the center will be a program to obtain and characterize new biopsies of patients’ tumors during their treatment. Scientists will study the DNA, RNA and protein in the biopsy samples to understand better how cancers respond or become resistant to drugs. Some of the specimens will be used to generate cancer cell lines in the laboratory.