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An unprecedented global effort to combat cancer is taking place with research groups from 10 different countries coming together to fight the deadly disease.

The collaborative project, dubbed the International Cancer Genome Consortium, will hunt the genetic mutations that drive 50 different types of cancer-from breast to bone. The consortium plans to share results rapidly, widely and freely so scientists can quickly develop new diagnostic tests and treatments.

"Cancer's complexity poses an enormous challenge. NIH is highly encouraged that the worldwide scientific community is joining to meet this challenge, and we are pleased to be a member of this ambitious international endeavor," said Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health, which is the U.S. research organization taking part in the ICGC. "The consortium's commitment to making its data rapidly available in public databases will serve to accelerate research into the causes and control of cancer in the United States and throughout the world."

Each member country plans to spend roughly $20-million (U.S.) tackling at least one subtype of the disease, collecting specimen samples from 500 patients, and studying the genetic glitches they find in their cancerous cells. With 50 cancers to be studied, not all of them have been assigned a country yet.

China, for example, intends to study liver cancer, because the country has particularly high rates of that disease. Japan will take on gastric cancer while India has an interest in oral cancers. Several countries will focus on breast cancers, including Britain and the United States, where research groups are also interested in brain and colon cancers.

The consortium has come together in a whirlwind of meetings, conference calls and funding commitments during the past six months, driven by swift advances in computing technology that allow researchers to rapidly read DNA. It is expected to amass 25,000 times more data than the international Human Genome Project, which produced the first draft sequence of human DNA in 2001.

Researchers suspect environmental, dietary and genetic differences can have an impact on the way cancers develop in different regions of the world.

"Clearly, there is an urgent need to reduce cancer's terrible toll. To help meet that need, the consortium will use new genome analysis technologies to produce comprehensive catalogs of the genetic mutations involved in the world's major types of cancer," said Thomas Hudson, M.D., of the ICGC Secretariat, which is based at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto. "Such catalogs will be valuable resources for all researchers working to develop new and better ways of diagnosing, treating and preventing cancer."

More countries/regions are expected to join the consortium in the coming months. The list so far includes: Australia, Canada, China, Europe, France, India, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.