The achievements of the £36 million Cancer Genome Project, at the Sanger Institute, near Cambridge, have so impressed an expert committee advising the United States National Cancer Institute (NCI) that it has recommended a similar scheme on a dramatically larger scale. The NCI, which commissioned the panel’s report, is expected to accept its proposal to invest $1.35 billion (£725 million) over nine years in tracing the DNA mutations that trigger the fifty most common forms of cancer.

Such a database would transform the search for new treatments for a disease that kills more than 155,000 people in Britain each year. The identification of the particular genes that malfunction to turn healthy cells cancerous will hand scientists thousands of potential targets for the development of new drugs.

The injection of such substantial US funds will also encourage other governments and charities to contribute to the scheme, creating a new version of the international Human Genome Project targeted specifically at cancer.

“Cancer is not a uniquely American problem or a uniquely anglophone project, and I think funding agencies in multiple countries should and will step up and meet this challenge,” said Professor Eric Lander, of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the panel chairmen. “The NCI asked us to recommend what we felt was the most compelling biotech project that would have the greatest effect on cancer, and we recommended that a wider cancer genome project would have the clearest effect all through the field.”

While the US Congress will have to approve the funding, medical research officials said they were keen to press ahead. Anna Barkley, deputy director of the NCI told The New York Times: “We are committed to do the sequencing of cancer genomes.”Cancer therapy has long been considered the area of medicine most likely to benefit from the mapping of the human genome, because it is essentially a disease of DNA.

Tumours form when genetic errors, either inherited or acquired through DNA damage, allow the cells to divide uncontrollably. Each kind of cancer is affected by different mutations, many of which vary from patient to patient, and most of which have yet to be pinpointed.

This makes the establishment of a cancer genome database a daunting prospect: to map every one would take a sequencing effort tens of thousands of times larger than the Human Genome Project.

Professor Lander said the work of the UK Cancer Genome Project, which has run since 2000 with funding from the Wellcome Trust, had been “absolutely critical” to the panel’s recommendation that it is now worth pressing ahead with a bigger scheme.

Though working with a small budget, the Sanger team, headed by Mike Stratton, has identified more than 100 new genes linked to cancers.

These include BRAF, which is mutated in more than two thirds of cases of malignant melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, and ERBB2, which malfunctions in a number of cancers.

The US consortium, chaired by Professor Lander and Leland Hartwell, a Nobel laureate and president of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, plans to sequence 12,500 tumour samples — 250 from each of the 50 commonest forms of cancer.

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