Accelerated Cure Project - Press

      BOSTON, MA. -- When he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis nearly two years ago, Art Mellor had already started three companies. Now he is starting a fourth, the non-profit Boston Cure Project, with Tim Vartanian, MD, PhD, head of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's MS unit, and assistant professor of neurology at the Harvard Medical School. Mellor didn't have the patience to wait for the basic research-oriented medical establishment to develop a cure for MS. He wanted a Manhattan Project.

      The Cure Project is reviewing the MS literature as it applies to each root cause category, and using the results to determine "promising areas of research and how to address them." The determination will constitute what he calls the "Cure Map," a road map of research projects designed to discover MS's cause. (More info at www.bostoncure.org.)

      "We've begun work on the cure map, characterizing genetic and pathogen-caused diseases, and we're just beginning to categorize the MS literature relating to genetics," says Mellor, the Cure Project's president and CEO. "We're shooting to have the first phase of the cure map complete by the end of the year."

      In contrast, the National Institute of Health funds research that investigators initiate, on the basis of

      quality of proposals and investigators, although NIH does interact with the scientific community to find out what areas of research are worthy, says Jason Karlawish, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's kind of like a two-headed dog. They wag each other. I think that's good."

      Mellor's approach is not completely novel. A variety of research foundations focus on specific diseases, though usually not so systematically. But some presage the Cure Map approach, says John C. Reed, MD, PhD, president and chief executive officer of the Burnham Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research institute in La Jolla. CapCure (www.capcure.com), the group started by junk bond creator Michael Milken to cure prostate cancer, is probably the most aggressive of these. Milken has arranged, for example, to develop improved

      animal models, and to obtain fresh tissue from patients and to have their DNA sequenced by Leroy Hood's

      Institute for Systems Biology (www.systemsbiology.com). The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation has made equal progress, says Robert Goldstein, MD, PhD, the group's senior scientific officer. Similar efforts, says Reed, could speed discovery of the cause of MS.

      Critics voice various objections to the Cure Map approach. Understanding cause does not always lead to a cure, says Sam Silverstein, MD, professor and chairman of physiology and cellular biophysics, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, referring to HIV. True, says Rowena Johnston, PhD, basic research manager of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. But HIV is a speedy target. The virus mutates so quickly that "it changes more in a day than the flu changes in a year."

      Nor is understanding of cause necessary for successful treatment, said several critics. But in most cases, it helps, says Johnston.

      Leroy Hood, head of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, thinks the approach is logical, but that the task is overwhelming. "Maybe the National Library of Medicine could monitor 50 academic groups for them," he says, illustrating the scale.

      But Mellor knows how to think big. "We just discovered that there is this MS project they are trying to pull together at the Whitehead [Institute]. If they make it a bit bigger, we can piggy back research onto it.

      Arnold Relman, editor-in-chief emeritus of the New England Journal of Medicine and professor emeritus of medicine and social medicine at the Harvard Medical School calls the Cure Project's approach "naive." "Thousands of investigators are following up every conceivable lead and synthesizing the literature in their heads, and such a group will add nothing," he says.

      But the targeted approach's time has come, says Reed, ushered in by a smorgasbord of new technologies. "With tandem mass spectrometry, the core technology that defines the field of proteomics, you can look at every single protein in the cell, and compare diseased tissues to normal tissues. New technologies allow you to ask novel questions that were not possible a few years ago. Even now, scientists like myself are only learning how to apply these in our work."

      Some observers suggested that the medical research establishments may already be using the Cure Project's modus operandi. Story Landis, PhD, scientific director of the intramural research program, National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke referred to a study, Multiple Sclerosis: Current Status and Strategies for the Future, produced at the request of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), with input from a panel of leading scientists in the field.

      "They are not making cure maps,"says Mellor. "For example, Recommendation 1 simply specifies that 'Research on the pathological changes underlying the natural cause of MS should be emphasized.' A cure map would describe in detail research that might lead to discovery of a cause."

      "The point isn't that these people are doing the wrong thing," says Mellor, "But the results of what they are doing are not being used effectively to solve this specific problem. We want to drill down another layer, and say here's how we can get to the solution.