June 1, 2005 (Vol. 1, No. 1) Collaborative Software Administrative Updates Key Web Pages at FHCRC

Dear Colleagues:

I am very excited to formally address our collaboration on biomarker discovery through our first newsletter. It is a pleasure to inform you of the consortium's progress.

We now have five confirmed teams: two teams in Korea, one in China, one in Taiwan, and one in the United States. There is also the possibility of teams joining us from Australia, France, Singapore and Canada. Future issues of the newsletter will highlight each team in the consortium.

As you know, the purpose of the consortium is to advance medical research and cancer patient outcomes by discovering biomarkers for the assessment of disease risk, early detection of disease, therapeutic prognosis and response to treatment as well as disease recurrence. Success will require significant improvements in the discovery of biomarkers, the current bottleneck in the process, and will require a large scale effort much like the human genome project. The International Cancer Biomarker Consortium creates a virtual infrastructure to facilitate highly coordinated biomarker discovery. All participants will be able to adopt data standards, share data, work on the same tissue samples, and investigate mouse models of the disease site as well as human tissue. The Hutchinson Center will coordinate the research program providing central Information Technology (IT) facilities, algorithms, and reagents. Karma Kreizenbeck, the Administrator for at the Hutchinson Center, serves as the project manager for the consortium.

Best regards,

Lee Hartwell
President and Director
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Informatics

Dr. Martin McIntosh is leading a team in the development of the Computational Proteomics Analysis System (CPAS). We will provide further details on this system in the next issue of the newsletter. In the meantime, we ask that you identify your lead informatics person for your team and send their contact information to Karma. We encourage your lead informatics person to visit the FHCRC for a two day training in the CPAS system.

Newsletter

This is the first in a series of newsletters that all team members will receive regularly. This will be a forum for regular updates regarding the consortium. Please forward Karma a contact list of all team members who should be on the newsletter distribution list.

Meetings

Any team members attending the Pacific Health Summit in Seattle, June 8-10, are invited to attend an International Biomarker Team dinner on June 10, 2005. This will give investigators an opportunity to meet and provide updates on their team's progress. For more information regarding this dinner, please contact Karma at kkreizen@fhcrc.org.

The first International Biomarker Team Conference will be held in Seattle, Washington on October 11-12, 2005. This meeting will provide an opportunity for team members to learn the research goals and capabilities of other teams and to meet for future collaboration. We encourage you to bring as many as 6 of your team members. We will be able to provide for your meals and hotel lodging while you are at the meeting. However, we do not have funds to pay for everyone's travel. If you are unable to provide your own travel funds from your project budget, please let us know as we will have some limited resources.

Steering Committee

We are in the process of forming the Steering Committee. The Principal Investigator of each team will is invited to serve on the steering committee as well as some outside experts including Dr. Reudi Aebersold (Switzerland), Dr. Dick Smith (PNNL), Dr. Steve Carr (Broad Institute), Dr. Martin McIntosh (FHCRC) and Dr. Leigh Anderson (Plasma Proteome Institute).

Website

We are working on developing the website for the Consortium. Each team will be highlighted with a page describing their project, expertise, and team members. We will be in contact with you regarding the format for this information. Please identify the team member that with whom we should work on your team profile and forward that information to Karma.

What we need from you:

• Identify the team member with whom we should work on your team profile for the website
• Identify the lead informatics person from your team and provide their contact information
• List all team members that should be included on the distribution list for the e-newsletter

If you haven't already, please forward this information to Karma Kreizenbeck at kkreizen@fhcrc.org.

We are very encouraged with the increasing interactions with major institutions and scientists in the Pacific Rim and beyond and are eager to move forward with this collaboration.

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