By Diagnostics World Staff
February 19, 2019 | The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard announced today a new $15 million commitment by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., former CEO and chairman of the board of IBM Corporation, and current chairman of the board of directors of the Broad Institute, to create the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics at the Broad Institute. The new Center will be endowed with an additional commitment of $10 million by the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation.
The Gerstner Center aims to advance blood-based biopsies for tracking disease progression and pursue other cancer diagnostics that have the potential to benefit millions of patients worldwide. The new Center builds upon a major effort at Broad focused on elucidating the mechanisms of cancer drug resistance, launched by a $10 million commitment from the Gerstner Family Foundation in 2015. This work has already given rise to a major project with IBM Watson Health to understand and prevent cancer progression, supported by $50 million in funding to create and make freely available to the scientific community data about cancer resistance.
While many aspects of cancer treatment have improved substantially over the past decade, diagnostics have lagged. Today, in order for a doctor to monitor a patient's disease progression or response to treatment, they must either obtain a surgical tumor biopsy or send the patient for a CT or MRI scan. These approaches can be costly, invasive, and most importantly, provide no molecular insights.
Blood biopsies have the potential to monitor a patient's response to treatment with molecular precision, with the potential to identify tumor recurrence much earlier than existing tests. As a result, blood biopsy can help patients and doctors determine whether a change in treatment is needed.
"There is a transformation underway in the field of cancer diagnostics," Eric S. Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute, said in a press release. "I am astounded at the progress we have seen in just the last five years—especially in the area of blood biopsies—by researchers here at the Broad and at other institutions. We have the opportunity now to profoundly improve patient care. With Lou's visionary partnership, we can move closer toward making blood biopsy and other diagnostic technologies for tracking disease progression a powerful new standard-of-care for patients."
The Gerstner Center will focus on response-monitoring, that is, tracking how a patient is faring under treatment, whether that is chemotherapy, radiation, or immunotherapy. It will also focus on studying patients with minimal residual disease, which involves identifying small numbers of cancer cells that remain in people who have undergone treatment, and which may result in relapse months to years, or even decades, later. Monitoring either patient response or minimal residual disease using blood biopsy requires greater sensitivity than is currently available, which is why the new Center will focus on these particular areas.