On Oct. 2, 2017, a research team led by Haian Fu, PhD, within the cancer genomics center at Emory University and Winship Cancer Institute, announced they were selected by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to participate in an elite national network focused on discovery of new cancer targets and precision cancer therapies.

The Emory Molecular Interaction Center for Functional Genomics (MicFG) will be funded by a $4.52 million grant over five years. It is one of 12 centers designated for the NCI’s Cancer Target Discovery and Development (CTD2) Network. Emory was first chosen by the NCI for its CTD2 Network in 2012. The CTD2 initiativewas established to advance the knowledge of cancer etiology and mechanisms, and to potentially accelerate the development of therapeutic targets for precision oncology using computational and functional genomic approaches.

The Emory CTD2 Center will focus on networks of protein-protein interactions created by mutated residues in oncogenes and tumor suppressors found in patient tumors. These unique protein-protein interactions could become tumor-specific targets for cancer drug development.

Although large amounts of data have been generated for genomic alterations in cancer, scientists face mounting challenges in translating these data into precision drug therapies. The Emory team will use powerful high-throughput screening technology, housed in the Emory Chemical Biology Discovery Center, to generate cancer-specific protein-protein interaction data. The bioinformatics team will analyze and integrate these data with genomic and clinical information for target prioritization and for public data sharing. The physician team will help provide disease insights to link genomic alterations with patient populations of specific tumor types for personalized medicine.

In ongoing research, the team aims to establish high resolution oncogenic PPI maps; systematically apply informatics pipelines to discovery of promising PPI drug targets guided by genomic precision; and identify chemical probes that could disrupt these vital PPI pathways in tumors to advance therapeutic discovery and development.