A team of scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center will lead an initiative launched June 27 by the National Cancer Institute to advance the use of targeted proteomics and genomics against ovarian cancer.

The new Proteogenomic Translational Research Centers, or PTRCs, established by the NCI’s Office of Cancer Clinical Proteomics Research, or OCCPR, involves teams of researchers and oncologists across the U.S. and aims to integrate proteomics with genomics (“proteogenomics”) into NCI clinical trials.

“We envision that PTRCs will collaborate with NCI–sponsored clinical trials to expand/deepen our knowledge of drug response and resistance, ultimately improving our understanding of the cancer and tumor proteome,” said Dr. Henry Rodriguez, director of OCCPR.

At Fred Hutch, Dr. Amanda Paulovich is co–principal investigator of a team that will use recent technological advances in collecting and analyzing massive proteogenomic data sets to find ways to better match ovarian cancer patients with treatments that will work.

“Despite advances in chemotherapy and surgery, the overall survival of patients with ovarian cancer has not significantly changed in decades,” said Paulovich, a member of the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutch. “This is because drug–resistant cancer cells enable tumors to keep growing.”

“Ovarian cancer by nature is often diagnosed at a late stage. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know ahead of time whether the initial treatment will work,” said Dr. Michael Birrer, co–principal investigator with Paulovich on the new grant. Birrer is an ovarian cancer doctor who has more than 30 years of clinical trial and translational research experience. He leads the gynecological cancer program at Massachusetts General Hospital, and later this year he will become director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“If the treatment doesn’t work the patients can be left too sick to participate in a clinical trial,” Birrer said. “This project has the potential to identify biomarkers to predict these patients and to identify pathways that will provide novel therapeutic targets.”

Previous studies have tried to find a predictor of treatment response and have failed, possibly because they were looking at only the genome or were only able to look at one protein at a time, Paulovich said.

“There’s no one mechanism of resistance; we’re going to look at the entire network of proteins and genes that together have a role,” said Paulovich, who’s also a professor of medicine in the Division of Oncology at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

She and her collaborators believe that technological advances in large–scale proteogenomics that can look at many biological markers at once will be able to reveal how a particular person’s tumor resists chemotherapy.