Roswell Park's Norma Nowak, PhD, Part of the Award Winning Team

Newswise — Norma J. Nowak, PhD, a nationally recognized leader in genomic technology and cancer genetics research at Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI), joined colleagues from the University of California, San Francisco, Comprehensive Cancer Center and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in accepting the AACR Team Science Award at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), April 12 - 16, in San Diego, CA.

The AACR Team Science Award "recognizes an outstanding interdisciplinary research team for its innovative and meritorious science that has advanced or likely will advance our fundamental knowledge of cancer or a team that has applied existing knowledge to advance the detection, diagnosis, prevention or treatment of cancer."

Dr. Nowak's team was cited for developing comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) and array CGH (aCGH), for nurturing their evolution over the past 15 years into a widely used approach to genetic analysis, and for pioneering their biological application. These technologies identify numerical differences in DNA between tumor and normal cells and cells from individual inherited disorders.

Dr. Nowak led and coordinated the three groups involved in the National Cancer Institute's extramural Cancer Chromosome Aberration Project that provided the foundation for bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) aCGH. She also assembled information regarding BAC clones and made it available widely on the Internet.

"The impact of the BAC array platform for aCGH has been enormous," according to Donald L. Trump, MD, President and CEO of RPCI. "With its evolution from Dr. Nowak's research to mainstream acceptance as the gold standard for array-based genomic analysis, over 4,000 samples from 30 different types of cancer have been analyzed by aCGH at the Mircroarray and Genomics Resource at Roswell Park."

"Array CGH has evolved from a discovery-driven technology to one that has diagnostic and prognostic applications," notes Candace S. Johnson, PhD, Chair of the Department of Pharmacology & Therapeutics, Robert, Anne and Lew Wallace Chair in Translational Research and Associate Director, Translational Research at RPCI. "Dr. Nowak's efforts to bring this technology into the clinical setting offers opportunities for gene discovery and improved treatment for patients with " or at risk of " cancer."

Dr. Nowak is an Associate Professor of Oncology at RPCI and serves as Director of the Microarray and Genomics Resource at Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Director of Science and Technology at the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences at the University at Buffalo. The New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, created in Buffalo in 2002 as a hub of life sciences expertise and innovation in Upstate New York, is a research collaborator with Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.

Roswell Park Cancer Institute, founded in 1898, is the nation's first cancer research, treatment and education center and is the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in Upstate New York. RPCI is a member of the prestigious National Comprehensive Cancer Network, an alliance of the nation's leading cancer centers. Roswell Park has affiliate sites and collaborative programs in New York, Pennsylvania, and in China. For more information, visit RPCI's website at http://www.roswellpark.org, call 1-877-ASK-RPCI (1-877-275 7724) or e-mail [email protected].