Dear Friend,

Greetings and happy holidays! Thanks to your support, 2009 has been a year of remarkable progress for the Chordoma Foundation and for the entire field of chordoma research.

This year researchers funded by the Chordoma Foundation made major breakthroughs including: discovering a gene responsible for familial chordoma, and identifying a promising new drug combination that may help chordoma patients. And we're proud to have sparked new collaborations between researchers across the world: in England and Germany, at the University of Florida and at Harvard, and even between labs at Duke and UNC! Just yesterday one of these collaborations resulted in a publication that reports the discovery of two new potential therapeutic targets in chordoma. 

Meanwhile we've paved the way for even more progress in the year to come by funding the development of much needed cell lines and animal models, and launching a cutting-edge Chordoma Genome Project which is already beginning to reveal clues about the origins of chordoma.

Here at the Chordoma Foundation our capacity to catalyze progress continues to grow as we've welcomed our first two full time employees, and two new board members to our talented team.

Momentum is building, and the future is looking increasingly hopeful. See below for some of the latest progress. Yet, much work remains to be done, and many more problems remain to be solved as we race towards a cure. We value your support and are glad that you are part of the solution.

Thank you for believing in us. Together we will cure chordoma!

Josh and Simone Sommer
Co-founders

  New Potential Therapeutic Targets Identified

Working with the Chordoma Foundation, researchers at Vanderbilt University and Duke University have identified two new potential approaches for treating chordoma, and have also identified two new prognostic factors that could aid in the clinical management of the disease. These findings are reported in a paper entitled "Methylthioadenosine phosphorylase (MTAP) and activated insulin-like growth factor 1 receptor/insulin receptor: potential therapeutic targets in chordoma" which will be published in The Journal of Pathology.

This multi-institutional research project was sparked as a result of conversations during the Second International Chordoma Research Workshop. It was spearheaded by Dr. Justin Cates, a leading chordoma pathologist at Vanderbilt University, in collaboration with Josh Sommer of the Chordoma Foundation, who is first author on the paper. Learn more about what these findings mean »

Renowned scientists use latest technology to decode the DNA blueprint of chordoma

In June of this year the Chordoma Foundation began funding a comprehensive survey of the chordoma genome using the most advanced technologies available to catalogue the genetic changes - known as mutations -responsible for causing chordoma.

This project compares DNA in chordomas with DNA in normal cells to identify cancer-causing mutations. In Phase I researchers are focusing on mutations in the protein-coding region of the genome called the "exome," where mutations are most likely to cause harm. Cataloging all of these mutations will tell researchers what drives chordomas, and will indicate how to approach developing treatments.

We are now happy to announce that the first phase of this project has swung into high gear, and researchers have begun sifting through reams of data that has already emerged. Once this raw data is processed and validated, it will quickly be made available to other scientists.

This landmark project involves collaboration between several investigators including chordoma researcher Dr. Adrienne Flanagan at the University College London, prominent cancer geneticist, Dr. Mike Stratton, at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and Dr. Eric Green, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Thanks to Dr. Flanagan's leadership, 10 chordomas are already being analyzed, and more tumors are in the analysis pipeline pending additional funding.

Last week Dr. Stratton's group made headlines when they published the first complete sequence of two cancer genomes from skin cancer and lung cancer. Watch Dr. Stratton describe this "fundamental moment in cancer research."

We salute Dr. Stratton and his team for this game-changing contribution to cancer research, and thank them for bringing their incredible expertise to bear on chordoma. It is truly encouraging that chordoma is now positioned at the leading edge of cancer research. As Dr. Stratton points out, this work will cause us to "think about cancer in a very different way," and will eventually allow doctors to make more informed and rational choices about which drugs to use to treat individual cancer patients.

We are now seeking to raise $1,000,000 to expand Phase I from 10 to 50 tumors, and to launch Phase II which will allow Dr. Stratton's team to survey the entire genome of chordoma in the same manner that they have done for lung and skin cancer. Please join us in making this project possible.

Chordoma Research Wiki Launched

In the search for cures for cancer, knowledge is power. To help make chordoma researchers more powerful, we've launched a collaborative online knowledgebase that will assemble and organize everything known about chordoma. All chordoma researchers are invited to contribute their knowledge to this continually growing document. The aims of this research wiki are to:

• Provide a one-stop source for chordoma-related information
• Clearly identify knowledge gaps and areas where research is needed
• Show how chordoma relates to other diseases and genes
• Make it easy for researchers unfamiliar with chordoma to enter the field
  

The Chordoma Research Wiki is powered by Wikigenes, a collaborative biomedical knowledgebase developed by Robert Hoffman, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  According to Dr. Hoffman "the rationale behind WikiGenes is to provide a platform for the scientific community to collect, communicate and evaluate knowledge about genes, chemicals, diseases and other biomedical concepts in a bottom-up process."

The Chordoma Foundation is the first organization to pilot wikigenes as a disease-specific knowledgebase. We thank Dr. Hoffman for adapting this valuable tool to fit seemlessly into our website.

Wikigenes differs from other wikis in several ways. Most importantly, in Wikigenes authorship matters: every word is attributed to an author, creating accountability and credibility that are lacking in other wikis. Wikigenes also makes it easy for authors to create links, and logical connections between chordoma and other diseases or genes. While the network of links this creates is helpful to readers, it has an even greater hidden value by enabling computers to mine the literature for new patterns and connections.

Partnering for Cures

We recently presented the Chordoma Foundation's accomplishments and strategy at the Inaugural Partnering for Cures Conference hosted by FasterCures. This first-of-its-kind meeting brought together philanthropy, medical research foundations, and the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries in an effort to forge strategic collaborations key to the timely development of new medical solutions. The meeting highlighted best practices in the conduct and management of medical research and outcomes-oriented approaches that could streamline the search for cures.

We are honored to have been selected to present alongside some of America's most successful and innovative medical research foundations including the Michael J Fox Foundation For Parkinson's Research, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation.