Government and private sector cancer scientists have launched a research partnership to find biomarkers for lung cancer that develops in people who have never smoked. The research studies are designed to create a better understanding of the biology of lung cancer and to develop a test to detect early-stage lung cancer in lifetime non-smokers.

The Canary Foundation, a non-profit organization that funds research in early cancer detection, and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, are sponsoring this multi-institutional effort. NCI's Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) and the Canary Foundation will provide initial funding of $1 million each.

Research has shown that lung cancer in people who have never smoked differs in many ways from the disease in smokers. For example, non-smokers with lung cancer have different tumour tissue structure, gene mutations, and demographic profiles than smokers with lung cancer.

"Efforts to study the disease in non-smokers have been limited, and no screening tests or approaches for identifying individuals at increased risk are available," said Samir Hanash, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, and team leader for Canary Foundation-funded projects. "This inability to recognise non-smokers who are at risk often leads to delays in diagnosis and results in cancer identification at an advanced stage, and this problem is what we're tackling with this new study."

Global estimates suggest that as many as 25 per cent of all lung cancers worldwide - 15 per cent of those in men and 50 per cent of those in women - are not attributable to smoking. "If you consider lung cancer in never smokers as a separate category, it ranks as the seventh most common cause of cancer deaths worldwide, even before cancers of the cervix, pancreas and prostate," commented Adi Gazdar, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, and team leader for the NCI-funded studies.

Using lung cancer cell lines, tissue, and blood specimens, researchers at five of the nation's leading research institutions will undertake a coordinated approach to biomarker discovery using their expertise to study the same sets of specimens by different methods. The researchers will deposit the data in a single repository, and integrate the results to find the most promising biomarkers. Because of this design, this project will also serve as a pilot study to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and the ability to integrate the data across different platforms. If it is successful, the researchers plan to open the project to additional collaborators from the EDRN.

The NCI-EDRN will fund most of the tumour studies, and the Canary Foundation will provide funding for the cell culture studies.

"This project is extremely important, both in its approach toward lung cancer detection and in its structure as a multi-institutional, transdisciplinary project funded through a public-private partnership," said John E. Niederhuber, M.D., director of the National Cancer Institute. "Identification of biomarkers, which tell us who is at risk for cancer and help diagnose cancer at the earliest possible stages, is an important priority in cancer prevention research and a key component in efforts to reduce the burden of this disease."

Canary Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to the goal of identifying cancer early through a simple blood test and then isolating it with imaging. Since 2004, Canary has raised over $30 million in pledges towards its initial goal of $50 million for early detection research. Its collaborative research programs span multiple disciplines and institutions.