CPTAC renews funding for proteogenomics research at Baylor

The Office of Cancer Clinical Proteomics Research at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, has reaffirmed its commitment to furthering proteogenomics research by announcing the next round of Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) centers. As part of this new phase, Baylor College of Medicine will continue to serve as a Proteogenomic Data Analysis Center (PGDAC) and will receive $4.4 million in funding over five years.

“We are very excited to be part of the next phase of the CPTAC consortium,” said Dr. Bing Zhang, principal investigator of the Baylor site and professor in the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center and Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor. “During the past decade, we have witnessed the emergence and quick growth of cancer proteogenomics, driven to a large extent by the consortium. In the next five years, we will continue developing and improving our computing tools, workflows and web portals for proteogenomic data analysis and integration, with an ultimate goal of accelerating the translation of cancer proteogenomics data into better understanding of cancer biology and improved cancer diagnosis and treatment.” Zhang also is a McNair Scholar and member of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor.

The Baylor PGDAC will focus on sequence and pathway/network-based proteogenomic integration. The center’s goals are to analyze CPTAC proteogenomic data to reveal biological and clinical insights, to advance data analysis through computational tool development and to identify candidate biomarkers for targeted protein assays.

Other PGDAC sites include the Broad Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the University of Michigan. Baylor was named as part of the CPTAC in 2017. Baylor’s CPTAC research includes publications on colon cancer, endometrial cancer, head and neck cancer and pancreatic cancer, among other cancer types.

Read more about the other CPTAC sites here.