Brain Power

Subhashree Madhavan and the Rembrandt project team fight a killer with a "killer app."

Subhashree Madhavan spends her days tracking a killer. Last year, cancer surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death among people under 85 in the United States. Brain tumors specifically are stalking the young, and now are the leading cause of cancer-related death in children under 18, the third-leading cause for males 18 to 54 and the fourth-leading cause for women 18 to 34.

Scientists have only begun to unravel the biology of tumors. What makes a tumor tick can be so precise that, if it can be understood, a specialist could recommend a specific treatment, perhaps one that's unique to a single patient. But one of the biggest barriers to harnessing that information, and thus finding breakthrough treatments, has been a lack of information-sharing between clinicians and researchers.

Madhavan leads a team, drawn from several clinical and research disciplines, that many believe will take down those historical barriers. The team's secret weapon is called Rembrandt, the Repository for Molecular Brain Neoplasia Data. In the simplest sense, Rembrandt is the fullest and most analytically powerful database on brain tumors ever assembled. It marries data from hundreds of brain tumor patients-the clinical side of the puzzle-with molecular and genetic data about many types of tumors. With a few clicks of a mouse and a little data entry, just about anyone can find potentially groundbreaking information about how tumors behave.

For Madhavan, the fight plays out on a personal level. Some of her relatives have been struck with brain cancer. When she came to the National Cancer Institute in January 2004, she found herself working with a former colleague, Peter Covitz. The pair had been researchers at a biotechnology firm, and shortly after arriving at the institute were approached by a leading clinical investigator, Dr. Howard Fine, who wanted to find a way to merge those two important tumor data sets. It seemed like a "perfect fit," Madhavan recalls, an opportunity to build what software engineers call "the killer app," an application that hasn't existed before and has the potential for widespread appeal.

But Madhavan and others see Rembrandt as more than just a killer new program. Cancer researchers hope it will advance the field of research altogether, from "bench to bedside," Madhavan says, by instilling a team approach to finding a cure. "Technology is just a means," she says. "It's not the end."