The Human Genome Project

What's the Short-term Payoff?

March 2009

So what’s the short-term payoff? The short-term payoff is we’ll have very powerful markers for the early detection of cancer. Take a cancer like ovarian cancer which is called the “silent killer of women.” The reason it is the silent killer of women is that the vast majority of women are detected when this cancer has spread outside of the ovaries. If we had better markers, protein markers which are produced in cancer cells which could be detected with mass spectrometry, we could detect ovarian cancer at a much earlier stage. In addition we are going to start seeing signatures that will tell us something about the clinical behavior of tumors. This is an aggressive cancer based upon the signature that we’ve seen. Perhaps we need an alternate type of therapy versus this is a cancer that is going to be very well treated by this chemotherapeutic agent. But in addition we are going to determine important genes involved in the development of cancer and as we find important genes, we are going to start to find the Achilles heel of the cancer cells. A new era of treatments are going to be based on novel technologies that aren’t just killing the most aggressively growing cells. Chemotherapy is an effective way for treating many cancers but it’s a poison that kills growing cells. If we understand the important genes that are altered in cancer, maybe we can target those genes and have therapies that are less harsh on the patients and more specific to the cancer.

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Jump to section:

• Introduction
• How Do We Obtain Genetic Information?
• Cell Cross-Section
• Different Cell Types
• What Happens When You Sit Outside in the Sun?
• Melanoma
• DNA is the Altered Target in Cancer Cells
• DNA Structure
• How to Tackle a Problem as Difficult as Cancer?
• Sequencing DNA
• More on DNA Structure
• Replicating a Strand of DNA
• Developing the Deoxy Chain Terminiation Sequence
• Reading a DNA Sequence
• Gel Electrophoresis
• Two DNA Sequences Seen in Gel Electrophoresis
• Overlapping Pieces of DNA
• Requirements to Sequence the Human Genome?
• Advances in Sanger Sequencing
• Sequencing with Fluorescent Dye
• Advances in Fluorescent Sequencing
• Celera Genomics
• Capacity: 96 Capillary Sequencing
• Computers and the Human Genome Project
• Where are We Today?
• What Have We Learned From Genome Sequences?
• What Can We Do With Sequenced Genomes?
• Transcriptional Profiling (TP)
• Different Technologies to Produce Microarrays
• Utilizing Microarrays to Measure Gene Expression
• Hyrbidization to an Affymetrix Array
• Gene Expression Comparison Between Samples
• Gene Expression Map
• Proteomic-Based Strategies
• Example of a Single Gene
• Proteomics
• How Do We Quantify Proteins?
• Differentiate Between Control and Disease State
• Mass Spectrometry
• Electrospray Ionization FT-ICR Mass Spectrometer
• LC-ESI-TOF vs LC-FT-ICR Mass Spectrometry
• What's the Short-term Payoff?
• What's the Long-term Payoff?
• Diagram of Pathways Involved in Steroid Metabolism
• Questions?