Scientists have completed a deep analysis of the proteins driving cancer across multiple tumor types, information that can’t be assessed by genome sequencing alone. Understanding how proteins operate in cancer cells raises the prospect of new therapies that block key proteins that drive cancer growth, or therapies that trigger immune responses to abnormal proteins created by cancer cells. Led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Brigham Young University, and other institutions around the world, the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium investigates key proteins driving cancer and how they’re regulated. The findings were published August 14, 2023 in a set of papers in the journals Cell and Cancer Cell (see below). The Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium is funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “In our efforts to develop better cancer therapies, this new analysis of the proteins driving tumor growth is the next step after cancer genome sequencing,” said senior author Li Ding, PhD, the David English Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Washington University. “Through our past work sequencing the genomes of cancer cells, we identified almost 300 genes driving cancer. Now, we are studying the details of the machinery these cancer genes set in motion--the proteins and their regulatory networks that actually do the work of causing uncontrolled cell division. We are hopeful this analysis will serve as an important resource for cancer researchers seeking to develop new treatments for many tumor types.”