Los Alamos research on cancer's origins key part of huge grant
Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher Ludmil Alexandrov has been announced as a member of one of the first four global research teams funded under Cancer Research UK's "Grand Challenge," which seeks to revolutionize the understanding of cancer and its prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
The Grand Challenge aims to help overcome the biggest obstacles to cancer research in a global effort to beat the disease sooner. "This research could dramatically improve our understanding of what causes cancer and lead to better information for people on how to reduce their risk of developing cancer," said Alexandrov, who has used Los Alamos National Laboratory computational tools to aid in cancer research with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute partners for several years.
The four Grand Challenge-winning international, multidisciplinary teams will bring together people, technology and knowledge on a scale that has not previously been undertaken in cancer.
"Linking Mutational Signatures Back To The Events That Caused Them"(Grand Challenge 3)
Alexandrov's pioneering team will study genetic samples from five continents to understand the DNA damage associated with different cancers, to understand what causes them and to determine if they can be prevented. The project will be led by Professor Mike Stratton at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, with collaborators from France, the USA and UK. The team's project is aimed at discovering the causes of cancer by studying its DNA "fingerprints."
Co-investigators:
- Dr. Ludmil B. Alexandrov, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA
- Professor Allan Balmain, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), USA
- Dr. Paul Brennan, International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), France
- Dr. Peter Campbell, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK
- Professor David Phillips, King's College London, UK
- Mimi McCord, Patient Advocate
- Maggie Blanks, Patient Advocate
What they'll study, and why
Things in our environment, and behaviors like smoking and drinking alcohol, can cause cancer by damaging our cells' DNA, leaving distinctive patterns known as a mutational fingerprints. But right now, scientists don't know everything that causes them.
Stratton, Alexandrov and their teammates want to fill in the missing gaps. In a project of epic scale that spans five continents and 5,000 patient samples, Stratton's team wants to build a much deeper understanding of DNA damage - what causes it and how it leads to cancer. They want to identify as yet unknown causes of cancer, determine which ones are due to environmental exposures and lifestyle behaviors and figure out exactly how they cause cancer.
Alexandrov has previously modeled the cancer mutational processes as a blind-source-separation problem to distinguish coherent signals from a noisy background, a methodology used in other areas of the Laboratory's research related to its nuclear-security mission. The project will draw on the Laboratory's high-performance computing resources and expertise, as well as expertise in numerical optimization problems.
"Ludmil's work is an impressive example of Los Alamos's work on understanding the complex systems which confront many 21st century societal imperatives," said John Sarrao, Associate Director for Theory, Simulation and Computation at Los Alamos. "These challenges require a large-scale approach, one that integrates theory and modeling, data-generating experiments and observations, and supercomputer simulations. Los Alamos is proud to be part of this excellent international team."
Provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory
