August 28, 2012 3pm
TRICL Steering Committee Conference Call
Attendance:
Chris Amos
Laurie Emanuele
Rayjean?
Maria Landi
Daniella Seminara
Liz Gillanders
Angela Risch
Loic Le Marchand
1. Status of Funding/Relinquishment
Request for relinquishment submitted 2 months ago but MDA administration is still
reviewing and holding the relinquishment pending the arrival of their new Provost.
NIH prefers it to be processed by mid September. Daniella and Liz to follow up with
new Provost. MDA may be limited in time for making a decision on the
relinquishment. There should be follow up to describe the affect of the delay in
relinquishment and the consequences for the study due to the delay.
No Cost Extensions were issued to subawards to use their carryforward from the
prior period.
2. SNP selection for Affymetrix Axiome Array
The next phase of genotyping is being paid for. Jen Doherty at Dartmouth will be
buying into the Array. There is another call on Thursday to discuss genotyping and
for SNP placed on the Axiome Array.
3. Selection of Subjects
Regarding the pilot, James is sending samples but they are still being selected.
Andrea has to get the equipment set up for the selecting, Chris to check in with her.
Rayjean to send a list of groups to be selected as the final decision has not been
made yet – the list finalization will be done on the call Thursday.
Chris asked Andrea about the status of equipment at Toronto and she responded
that she is in the process of having the genotyping equipment sent there, but would
check back with the local representative.
4. Feedback from Bethesda Meeting for integration with other Area 2 groups
There is a request to be more engaged. Chris to contact the Ming You as there is a
need to be broader in reaching out to other Area 2 groups. Many of the other Area 2
investigators may be working together on other grants. We may need to indicate
the different strengths of the labs although they may not be as relevant. Methylation
in the p16 region may be an area of interest that cuts across other cancer sites.
5. Coordination of Data from Cohort Studies
Regarding the ACS letter where data can be obtained, should it be kept at Toronto?
If the grant is relinquished, modeling might sub back to MDA but without Carol the
level of involvement may need to be reorganized.
The pleiotropy project is ongoing. Everyone was ok with releasing study specific
results. Chris to follow up with Wei about releasing data to Hawaii for this project.
The current protocol and equipment were turned over to David Ma in Genetics.
Things are fine on the MDA website, nothing is to change here. The limitation is that
only Wei Chen remains as the analyst at M.D. Anderson, with Jianzhong Ma as a
faculty member to support the studies and protocol. Dakai Zhu is being retained at a
small level of effort to assure that the Unix environment is functional during the
transition period. Bo Peng is another scientist who is remaining in the group with
expertise in statistical genomics, who can assist with annotation (he has previously
not been very involved in TRICL). If Maria is willing to perform meta analysis across
the HapMap2 data and 1000 genomes projects she can run the remaining protocols,
with help from Wei. People are reluctant to upload (German group) given the
uncertainty about the grant. Data from the existing GWAS cannot be sent out yet
because the MTA for transmission to dbGAP has not yet been approved by MD
Anderson Cancer.
Protocols at Dartmouth to execute TRICL have been approved. Chris will push to
have MOU that will be set up at Dartmouth encompass all of the groups not just the
central repository, making the MOU a wheel and spoke system (not just a star
configuration). The MTA/MOU are not in place at Dartmouth yet. Because it is
summary data the risks are low for analyses at MDACC despite some concerns about
data integrity. We will wait another week to see if MDA will relinquish the grant to
evaluate how to proceed with respect to the Dartmouth MOU and placement of data
from ACS.