The National Institutes of Health is planning to spend upwards of a billion dollars to deploy the latest technology in the hunt for molecular signposts that will play a key role in diagnosing and treating all forms of cancer. In what is billed as the largest genetic research program since the human genome project outlined our genetic code, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni proclaimed the Cancer Genome Atlas initiative as the beginning of a new era in the treatment of cancer – a disease that will strike one half of all Americans at some point in their lives. "Thanks to the tools and technologies developed by the human genome project and recent advances in using genetic information to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment, it is now possible to envision a systematic effort to map the changes in the human genetic blueprint associated with all known forms of cancer," said Zerhouni. Researchers believe that what they know now about the molecular causes of cancer makes it possible to identify the errors in a cell's DNA that triggers cancer. And once armed with that information researchers will be able to identify a new generation of personalized medicines with much higher efficacy rates, as well new molecular diagnostics for detecting the disease at an early – and more easily treatable -- stage. National Human Genome Research Institute and the National Cancer Institute will bankroll the initial three years of the project at a cost of $100 million. "By pulling together some of the best minds in the cancer and genomics research communities, I am confident that the pilot will succeed, and we will go on to develop an atlas that will accelerate cancer research in ways we cannot even imagine today," said National Human Genome Research Institute director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD. It won't be easy. To accomplish its goal, researchers will need to gather hundreds of thousands of tumor samples from cancer patients. Those samples in turn will be studied so that the project leaders will be able to break down how cancers occur. In many cases, that could be a genetic error that triggers the overproduction of cancerous cells or the identification of molecules involved in genetic division. The project also has drawn early fire from at least a few experts in the field. Brigham and Women's Hospital Geneticist Steve Elledge and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Greg Hannon, for example, have said the project would starve more important projects of research funds while it was unlikely to meet its ambitious goals. Other critics have just as quickly piled on to complain of the NIH's slow progress on the subject, noting that a pilot project is likely to make only slow initial headway when the science is poised for huge strides toward's the NIH's express goal of eliminating the suffering and threat of cancer by 2015. But government research officials also note that this isn't virgin scientific territory, either. Private companies have already been able to develop drugs like Gleevec, a drug for chronic myeloid leukemia and gastrointestinal stromal tumors, and Herceptin, a drug for one form of breast cancer. And they know that other drugs are waiting to be developed for the more than 200 types of cancer that have been documented. The diagnostics field in cancer and other areas has been booming as well. Only weeks ago scientists split away from the newly sold Ambion in Austin to start Asuragen, which will use its expertise to develop new diagnostic tests for cancer. And Frost & Sullivan estimates that the molecular oncology market will boom ahead at a rate of 33 percent a year. The pilot project will initially focus on several specific cancers, and Zerhouni emphasized that researchers would need to hit several clearly outlined milestones before they would be allowed to go beyond the three-year study and on to complete the full atlas. But there's no mistaking their enthusiasm to complete the full task.