In 2016, ISAS started a collaboration with some of the leading research institutions in North America, aiming to develop new strategies for detecting and treating cancer. Apart from ISAS, the project partners include the American institute NCI (National Cancer Institute, as part of the National Institutes of Health, NIH) as well as the Canadian Universities McGill in Montreal, UVic (University of Victoria) in Victoria, and UBC (University of British Columbia) in Vancouver. Within this project, the cooperation partners carry out joint projects on coupling personalised proteome and genome analyses.
The collaboration is one of several newly developed, global collaborations with renowned research institutions, universities, and hospitals in the context of the "Cancer Moonshot" initiative, which the US government has initiated in 2016 to decisively advance cancer research.
The project partners will work out joint study concepts aiming to correlate data between gene and protein level. Thus, they want to throw light on disease causes and identify new therapeutic starting points. ISAS contributes its expertise in investigating protein degradation and signal transduction, which are of great significance for the genesis and progression of cancer: In most cases, mutations accumulate in tumour cells, changing the expression level of proteins or influencing degradation and modification processes. Often there are no antibody-based assays available to detect these modifications. Instead, ISAS aims to develop mass spectrometry techniques to examine these processes.
The results of the collaboration in the consortium will be made internationally accessible at once to advance cancer research on a global level.
