Cancer Center Sets $3 Billion Program

HOUSTON—The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is launching a multibillion-dollar initiative on Friday aimed at reducing cancer deaths over the next decade, saying a flurry of recent advances in genomics and other technologies has laid a foundation for making major new strides against the disease.
The effort, which the institution calls the Moon Shots program, is expected to spend as much as $3 billion over 10 years in a bid to reduce the toll of eight different cancers, and to develop an infrastructure and strategies for collecting and analyzing data that leaders of the effort say will be applied to other cancers as well.

The initiative will range from bolstering prevention efforts to accelerating development of so-called targeted cancer therapies that have already made important inroads against such conditions as breast cancer and melanoma.

Helping to drive the initiative is the plummeting cost of gene sequencing, which is enabling clinicians and researchers to obtain information on genetic aberrations that underlie patients' tumors and match them with drugs that target those anomalies. Other advances, including improved computational power to analyze burgeoning amounts of genomic data and the ability to manipulate genes in laboratory experiments to understand their function, also support the effort.

"It is very rare in the history of science that you have such a confluence of enabling technologies," said Ronald A. DePinho, president of M.D. Anderson. The advances make it possible, he said, to "dramatically reduce mortality [from cancer] in this decade and set the stage for cures in the decades ahead."

Dr. DePinho said that M.D. Anderson planned to contribute its own funds to the initiative, but that the bulk of the funding is expected to come from philanthropic gifts, research grants and revenue from additional cancer patients and commercialization of patentable discoveries the institution makes as part of the effort. The center already has "tens of millions" of dollars in donations in hand to jump-start the project, said Dr. DePinho, who declined to provide further financial details.

M.D. Anderson is among the world's leading cancer centers. It treated about 117,000 patients last year, including some 11,000 who are enrolled in roughly 1,000 clinical trials of experimental drugs and treatment regimens under way at the center.

The cancers initially targeted include lung, prostate, breast and ovarian cancers, melanoma and three types of leukemia. They were selected from proposals made by M.D. Anderson researchers based in part on their prevalence in the population and on recent gains against those cancers that increase the potential for success. The specific goals vary by cancer—for instance, one goal in prostate cancer is to reduce mortality by 30% in newly diagnosed patients at risk for recurrence.

Many of those cancers "are the biggies, and advances in these would have a large public-health impact," said Clifford Hudis, a breast-cancer expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who isn't involved in the project.

"The world would profit from more institutions taking an ambitious approach like this," added Dr. Hudis, who is president-elect of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. But he cautioned that the effort faces huge challenges. "The problems are big and complex," he said.

More than 575,000 Americans are expected to die of cancer this year, according to the American Cancer Society, making it the No. 2 cause of death after cardiovascular disease. Some 7.6 million people died of the disease world-wide in 2008, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

During the five years ended in 2008, the death rate from cancer in the U.S. declined at 1.5% to 2% a year. Recent advances in molecular biology and immunology have led to powerful new drugs for melanoma and lung cancer, for instance, and hope for further progress against the disease. They are also helping to fuel excitement that other tumors are ripe for similar successes.

"In almost every disease, we have an example of something that works," said Gordon Mills, head of systems biology at M.D. Anderson. "Once you have a first step, it's easier to take the second, the third."
But even in cases where tumors are initially knocked back by the new agents, patients typically develop resistance and their cancers recur or progress. Developing treatment regimens that can thwart resistance will be part of the Moon Shot effort.

Write to Ron Winslow at ron.winslow@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared September 21, 2012, on page A4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Cancer Center Sets $3 Billion Program.