Researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC and Childrens Hospital Los Angeles will receive a five-year, $9 million grant from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health to explore how information derived from comprehensive molecular and genetic analyses can be used to impact the care of cancer patients, and ultimately improve outcomes.

The grant is being awarded as part of the NCI’s Strategic Partnering to Evaluate Cancer Signatures (SPECS) program, through which $50 million has now been awarded to six organizations.

In addition to Childrens Hospital, the recipient list is composed of UC Irvine; the University of Nebraska Medical Center; the University of New Mexico; the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, Tenn.; and Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.

Timothy J. Triche, chief of the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at Childrens Hospital, vice chair of the Keck School department of pathology and professor of pathology and pediatrics, will be the principal investigator of the project at Childrens Hospital.

“We are using genomic technology to identify which genes indicate particular properties of the tumor,” Triche said.

“So far, this technique has allowed us to make highly accurate diagnoses, and we have been able to redefine several tumors that were thought to be something else,” he added.

Triche and his team use these refined diagnoses – these so-called “cancer signatures” – to better predict outcome or prognosis. The signatures “seem to work better than anything we have seen previously,” he said.

The SPECS projects are designed to bridge the gap between the discovery and application of molecular profiles by confirming, refining and evaluating molecular signatures that previously have been demonstrated to be clinically useful.

The SPECS grants also support multi-institutional, multidisciplinary research teams that leverage the NCI’s investment in cancer clinical trials, cancer centers, NCI intramural programs and its Specialized Programs of Research Excellence program.

Using the SPECS grant funding, Triche and his team hope to validate their previously derived cancer signatures on a new, independent group of patients.

“I hope to use newer and better technology in SPECS that measures expressed exons, or gene subunits, in all known genes, since it is now clear that there are many different versions of the same gene operative within a tissue or disease state,” Triche said.

He added that his long-term goals are to “identify gene targets for future development of targeted therapies, as well as more rational assignment of patients to existing therapies, based on such genetic information.”