Collaborators

The TARGET initiative is jointly managed within the National Cancer Institute (NCI) by the Office of Cancer Genomics (OCG) and the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (CTEP). In pursuing its mission, TARGET leverages the strengths and resources of other NCI programs, including the Children's Oncology Group (COG), The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), the Cancer Genome Characterization Initiative (CGCI) and the Strategic Partnership to Evaluate Cancer Signatures (SPECS).

TARGET is comprised of five disease-centered projects that form collaborative networks within and across project teams (PT). The PTs include clinicians, pathologists and basic scientists. The Principal Investigators (PI) of each team are members of the COG and participate in its clinical and biological trials. These trials have strict protocols to ensure high quality research samples, including rich clinical annotation, and are the source of the tissues that are collected. All data generated by each TARGET project team is deposited into a publicly accessible database, TARGET Data Portal. This data portal is managed centrally by the Data Coordinating Center, which is part of the NCI Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology.

Collaboration among the various groups connected with the TARGET initiative allows for both efficient discovery of therapeutic targets and rapid translation of findings into the clinic, which will ultimately reduce the devastating burden of cancer for children and their families.

Disease-specific TARGET collaborators are:

Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL)

• University of Colorado, Aurora, CO
• University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
• University of New Mexico Cancer Center, Albuquerque, NM
• St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, TN

Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML)

• Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA
• Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

Kidney Tumors

• Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago (Northwestern University), Chicago, IL

Neuroblastoma

• Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA
• Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
• NCI Center for Cancer Research, Bethesda, MD

Osteosarcoma

• Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, TX
• NCI Center for Cancer Research, Bethesda, MD
• Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

Collaborators that work across all TARGET project teams:

Children's Oncology Group

• Peter Adamson, M.D. (Chair)

The following are the specific COG groups involved in TARGET research:

• COG Chair's Office, Philadelphia, PA
• COG Biopathology Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, OH
• COG Group Operations and COG Statistics & Data Centers Headquarters, Arcadia, CA

National Cancer Institute (NCI)