Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has launched the Center for RAS Therapeutics, aiming to study and develop drug therapies for RAS-driven cancers.
RAS gene mutations are found in 20% of all cancers and are associated with lower survival rates compared to those without RAS gene mutations, according to a Dec. 6 news release from the institute.
The new center will be led by Alice Shaw, MD, PhD, thoracic medical oncologist and chief of strategic partnerships at Dana-Farber, and Andrew Aguirre, MD, PhD, gastrointestinal medical oncologist and physician-scientist at both Dana-Farber and Cambridge, Mass.-based Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.
The center will accelerate drug development to improve outcomes as well as support preclinical studies and clinical trials of newly developed RAS inhibitor therapies, according to the release.
"While RAS-targeting therapies hold tremendous promise, treatment resistance remains a significant problem that will require innovative combination therapy approaches," Dr. Aguirre said in the release. "The landscape of new RAS inhibitors is highly complex and centralized expertise is necessary to determine the right drug or combination of drugs for every patient. We will work closely with other academic and industry partners with the goal to improve our understanding of treatment resistance across tumor types, to discover new vulnerabilities in RAS-driven cancers, and to conduct the most efficient clinical trials of new therapies."