Development of Novel Affinity Reagents. During the past fiscal year, the Office of Science and Technology Resources (OSTR) has continued to support an initiative for generating high affinity reagents to serve as tools for molecular interrogation of pathways that become altered during cancer development. Partnerships with three biotechnology companies (Beckton Dickinson, Pharmingen, Rockland Immunochemicals, and Epitomics) have led to the creation of nearly 200 novel affinity reagents, polyclonal, and monoclonal antibodies against hundreds of key cancer related targets of interest to the CCR at minimal cost to CCR investigators. These partnerships represent savings of more than one million dollars to CCR and the NCI. All of the antibody characterization data generated by participating CCR investigators is made available to the companies involved through a Web site developed in a collaboration between the OSTR and the Advanced Biomedical Computing Center (ABCC). Each company uses this data in their marketing material when the antibodies are released for commercialization. Our partnership with Epitomics is for production of rabbit monoclonal antibodies. These antibodies are known to be much more stable and have higher affinities than mouse monoclonal or rabbit polyclonal antibodies. The OSTR negotiated a contract with the company to access their antibody production pipeline at a significantly reduced cost ($5,900 versus $20,000) from the catalog price. Similar to the other collaborative programs, CCR investigators will be required to characterize the antibodies and make data available to Epitomics for validation and commercialization. The OSTR is supporting a number of protein interaction screens in mammalian cells for CCR investigators through the Laboratory of Protein Characterization at the Frederick National Lab (FNL). The OSTR continues to evaluate all commercially available platforms gene expression profiling and other high throughput genomic technologies. To make the latest advances easily accessible to CCR researchers, the OSTR has established a number of arrangements with companies providing genomic and metabolomic profiling technologies and services (Affymetrix, NanoString, Agilent, Illumina, GenUs, Qiagen, HMT, Metabolon, etc.). These agreements have led to far lower cost and an efficient and easy way for CCR investigators to access these technologies. A subsidy program has been established providing subsidies to support CCR investigator access to advanced genomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and bioinformatic technologies. This funding mechanism has helped to extend the limited research dollars available to CCR laboratories and has permitted our researchers to conduct experiments that might otherwise be cost prohibitive. Many of the funded projects have led to important publications in top tier journals. Most recently, the OSTR has been involved in CCR's efforts to access the next generation sequencing technologies, including the setting up of a new NGS Core in building 37, which is available to any CCR investigator. In response to CCR's rapidly growing need to manage and analyze large sets of genomic and proteomic data, the OSTR has developed several partnerships with bioinformatics companies. At significant cost savings to NCI, OSTR negotiated a variety of license agreements on behalf of all NCI researchers for universal access to sophisticated tools for bioinformatic and statistical analysis of microarray experiments, proteomic profiling studies, and genomic analysis including next generation sequencing data. In addition, the OSTR has made a number of software applications for the investigation of pathways and biological association networks available to all of NCI. The OSTR continues to assess CCR's requirements in the area of bioinformatics and biostatistics. We continue to work with the Leidos Information Systems Program to create a CCR dedicated Bioinformatics Program to provide support to CCR investigators. Support for analysis of high throughput genomic and proteomic data is being made available through this new program, which is located on the Bethesda campus.
