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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 20, 2005 Contact: Sharon Hanley (518) 641-6406 [email protected] CANCER RESEARCH PIONEER TO JOIN ORDWAY RESEARCH INSTITUTE CANCER CENTER Albany, New York— Dr. Gennadi Glinsky, who has pioneered cancer translational genomics research focusing on prostate and breast cancer, will join the Ordway Research Institute in Albany beginning May 2, 2005. Dr. Glinsky will head the Translational and Functional Genomics Laboratory in the Cancer Center, with a joint appointment in the Division of Urology of Albany Medical College. The Division of Urology will organize prostate cancer clinical trials of the diagnostic assay developed by Dr. Glinsky The gene expression profile discovered by Dr. Glinsky and his team is highly informative in predicting the positive or negative outcome of therapy in cancer patients diagnosed with multiple types of cancer. “Those patients can be directed toward options that include more aggressive, often customized therapeutic strategies,” Glinsky said. “Many of those patients can consider clinical trial options that they may otherwise have overlooked or not felt justified. “If you identify the (patients) who are at a high likelihood of therapy failure, and therefore are candidates for more aggressive and often individually designed therapies, required treatment can be initiated closer to the time of diagnosis rather than much later 1 when the disease has spread and become incurable.” Knowledge of the genetic and molecular markers associated with the need for highly aggressive clinical cancer therapy may lead to identification of crucial genetic pathways who’s components would become attractive targets for development of novel, target-tailored individualized anti-cancer drugs. Dr. Glinsky gave a platform presentation discussing the success of these methodologies at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting on April 17, 2005 in San Diego, California. “The era of gene expression profiling of tumors has matured rapidly, thanks to Dr. Glinsky and a few other laboratories.” states Dr. Paul J. Davis, Director of Ordway Research Institute. He continues, “Dr. Glinsky’s profiling strategy not only predicts with a high level of certainty the future behavior of prostate or breast cancers in individual patients, but it also directs the oncologist to the best specific chemotherapeutic regimen for each tumor. This is an enormous advance. Currently, a one-size fits all approach in cancer chemotherapy causes us to treat all patients with a given tumor in the same expensive way. Dr. Glinsky’s approach has implications for the skyrocketing costs of cancer care, in that it identifies the patients who need intensive therapy and separates them from patients who will do very well with less toxic, less expensive care.” Background Information: Ordway Research Institute, Inc. is a not-for-profit, freestanding corporation with specific research themes and a mission to translate basic science observations into therapeutics. The Institute is committed to fostering inter-institutional, competitively-funded research. The research themes of the Institute expand on existing regional programs of excellence in New York’s Tech Valley. Ordway’s research takes place in The Center for Medical Science building at University Heights in Albany that houses the Institute’s researchers and investigators, plus research teams from the Wadsworth Center/New York State Department of Health. Ordway is affiliated with the Charitable Leadership Foundation in Clifton Park, New York and with Albany Medical College. The Center for Medical Science is the first research laboratory facility conceived in the region to serve multiple research institutions. 2