Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has launched a major new program to develop tests that could alert doctors to the earliest signs of cancer. Known as the Early Detection Initiative, the effort will benefit from $4.4 million in new funding from The Paul G. Allen Foundation for Medical Research of Seattle, the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles and businessman Donald J. Listwin of Woodside, Calif.

The Paul G. Allen Foundation for Medical Research is contributing $2 million toward the initiative, the W.M. Keck Foundation is contributing $1.4 million, and Donald Listwin is contributing $1 million. Additionally, the center will invest another $3.3 million to launch the program.

The goal of Fred Hutchinson's Early Detection Initiative, headed by its president and director, Nobel laureate Lee Hartwell, is the early identification of the onset and risk of a wide range of cancers and other diseases so they can be prevented or treated as soon as possible.

"The importance of this work is underscored by the fact that survival rates improve dramatically when cancers are diagnosed early, when the disease is still confined to the organ of origin," Hartwell said.

For example, if all colorectal-cancer cases were detected when localized, the overall five-year survival rates could improve from 64 percent to 90 per cent. Early detection also is key to managing breast, ovarian, prostate and other cancers. The five-year survival rate for breast- and prostate-cancer patients with localized, early stage disease is 85 percent to 95 percent and remains high at 10 years.

The $4.4 million in gifts will enable Fred Hutchinson to develop, test and implement methods for detecting proteins that signify the presence or risk of cancer in human blood samples. Researchers will use techniques made possible by the rapidly advancing field of proteomics, which attempts to catalog and describe the function of all of the proteins made by a cell or organism. Cancer cells may produce unique proteins, or proteins in different quantities, compared to normal cells.

It is expected that this five-year project will bring together the simultaneous application of biological, epidemiological and bioinformatics tools for early cancer detection. Bioinformatics relies on sophisticated software that enables scientists to analyze the large amounts of data generated from cataloging and comparing the genes and proteins of different individuals, thus enabling the identification of patterns of proteins that indicate disease in its early stages. Fred Hutchinson is working with several partners with specialized technical and bioinformatics expertise, including Microsoft and the Institute for Systems Biology.

The goal of the Early Detection Initiative is to demonstrate that blood-serum protein profiles can distinguish individuals with early stage cancer from those who are healthy. Fred Hutchinson's researchers already have experience in proteomics technologies and can identify and analyze molecular profiles from healthy individuals and from those with early stage cancer whose health histories and lifestyle factors are known. Additionally, the center's researchers have access to one of the nation's largest repositories of serum samples from large groups of individuals whose medical history and behaviors already have been documented throughout an extended period of observation.