The National Cancer Institute announced that it plans to award $13 million in grant funding in fiscal year 2016 to support the establishment of up to 10 centers that will support the agency's Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC).
 

CPTAC began in 2006 as part of a broader NCI initiative to "understand and address the experimental and analytical sources of error in existing proteomics technologies." The second phase of the consortium kicked off in 2011 with the goal of using the standardized proteomic workflows established in the first phase to complement genomics approaches for tumor analysis.
 

Thus far, the NCI said, the Proteome Characterization Centers (PCCs) that comprise CPTAC have interrogated colorectal, ovarian, and breast tumors and demonstrated the benefits of integrating proteomics with genomics to "produce a more unified understanding of cancer biology."
 

Through the latest funding opportunities, the NCI now aims to fund additional PCCs, as well as a number of Proteogenomic Translational Research Centers (PTRCs), which will apply standardized proteomic and genomic approaches to clinically relevant research projects, and Proteogenomic Data Analysis Centers (PGDACs), which will be tasked with analyzing and interpreting CPTAC data.
 

Specifically, the NCI said it will commit $4 million to fund up to three new PCCs that will use one or more proteomic technologies to comprehensively characterize the protein composition of human biospecimens and preclinical models provided by the agency, followed by further analysis of selected targets in subsequent studies.