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>> Javed Khan, M.D.:
The next phase of the,
the human genome project
that we're involved
in is really to, to the,
the TCGA and,
and the other international
efforts, the target initiative
for pediatrics,
what that's going
to do eventually is
to catalog all the changes
that occur commonly
across cancer and then commonly
across different cancer types
to identify the,
the achilles heel of,
of these cancers.
if a genes changed.
So
as scientist you say the change
must lead to some alteration in,
in how a cell behaves normally.
So there's a lot of new research
that needs to be done
to saying does this change the
behavior of a normal cell.
If it does change,
then behavior of it becomes
more cancerous
or spreads more easily,
for example, then, then you have
to say this is a, this is a,
what's called a driver mutation.
Some pediatric cancers
they're rare.
They act, they occur
at earlier age,
and so at the genetic level,
they're not as complicated as,
as say breast cancer
which have accumulated multiple
mutations, and what you're able
to do is actually find
that these are the key players
in cancer, not just
pediatric cancer.
So, so, really, it, what,
what these sort
of research is going to do is
to enable the research community
and pharmaceutical companies
to say, no,
these are the main targets we're
going to use
to develop drugs against,
basically.
Because these,
these are key
players rather than develop
for every single genome,
you say, OK, these are the 200
or so that are commonly altered
in cancer.
So we need to focus
on those, basically.
So the pharmaceutical industry
aren't going
to take every single gene and,
and then work on them.
So they need to know
from academia, from the NCI
which gene should we work on,
and that's what the,
what the translatable type
of genes that, that,
that we need to pass
on to groups that can, then,
develop drugs against that.
[ Silence ]