Overview
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute was among the key leaders in the inception of the project, building on the success of its Cancer genome project jointly led by Professor Mike Stratton, Director of the Sanger Institute, and Andy Futreal. The Consortium currently comprises research teams from Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, with more teams from Europe and other nations still expected to join. The role of the ICGC is to facilitate transfer of information and maximise each centre's contribution to the core dataset.
In November 2008, 11 teams funded by eight research organisations committed to the ICGC to study eight different tumour types. Each team will sequence individual tumour samples from over 500 patients with each type of cancer. This abundance of data will provide important information about the genetic changes that drive the development of each specific cancer type, and the common pathways that may be involved in different cancers.
ICGC members agreed common standards for informed consent and ethical oversight, and data collection and analysis at the inception of the project to boost efficiency of sample acquisition and data production. Results will be made rapidly and freely available to the global scientific research community for maximum public benefit.
The ICGC seeks additional partners from international research organisations to participate in this ambitious biomedical sequencing project, prioritising those cancer types that currently have the greatest impact on society, that are the most scientifically informative and that are currently the most amenable to study in terms of sample availability.
Mike Stratton and Peter Campbell continue to drive progress and delivery of results from the Consortium, and the Sanger Institute will provide regular updates on the progress of the ongoing projects during the active phase. In December 2009, the Sanger Institute contributed the first-ever complete catalogues of mutations in tumour samples, taken from a lung and a melanoma patient.
Funding agencies around the globe have committed to supporting projects on breast cancer, liver cancer, gastric cancer, pancreatic cancer and leukaemia; combined with extraordinary advances in technology, this progress means that the ICGC is already gaining exciting new insights into cancer genomes and the abnormal genes that are driving them.
Selected Publication
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International network of cancer genome projects.
Nature 2010;464;7291;993-8
PUBMED: 20393554; PMC: 2902243; DOI: 10.1038/nature08987

